Author: Dr Duncan Harding
ISBN No: 9780241446836
Review date: 17/12/2025
No of pages: 400
Publisher: Penguin
Publisher URL:
https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/144157/duncan-harding
Year of publication: 01/05/2024
Brief:
price
£25, hardback
The Criminal Mind is by a forensic psychiatrist; he begins with the statement that ‘…. The UK is gripped in a knife crime and murder epidemic …. What has happened to cause this?’ Why are youth in particular destroying life, feeling disenfranchised? While obeying patient confidentiality, Harding seeks ‘to open the lid on heartbreaking cases and situations, to try to understand these extreme patterns of behaviour’.
He opens the book proper grippingly, inside a court room, hearing and giving evidence as an expert witness of a 17-year-old accused of murdering his aunt. The defence is arguing that the accused is only guilty of manslaughter, claiming that the youth had psychosis (defined later as ‘a disconnection from reality’). Harding argues that the 999 recording of the accused reporting ‘I killed her’ is evidence that the youth was not psychotic when he strangled the woman with a dog lead. On such niceties of psychology do prison sentences hang.
Harding’s story turns to the autobiographical; he becomes a doctor, while also busking because he had talent as a musician. He goes into psychiatry, and learns ‘a terrible lesson (page 40) that you cannot fix a breakdown in mental health, like a physical doctor can fix a broken ankle. Harding learns on the job; for example, towards the end, from a 15-year-old gang member called Eric, who stabbed someone (not a gang member, it turned out) 27 times on the top deck of a bus. Harding resolves ‘always to sit downstairs on buses’ (page 374).
Harding cannot find any mental health problems with Eric: ‘No trauma or abuse or real deprivation,’ he tells a colleague. ‘Gang thinking has taken him over.’ The colleague explains to Harding that the gang members have codes of conduct, ‘it’s the rule of war …. What our young people need is a sense of belonging in society, ownership of the world in which they live. They need access to a lot more activities, sport, drama, anything that will involve them.’ It’s society’s wider problem, the colleague adds; and the doctors can do nothing. In such a violent world, where some youths are out of mainstream school and society, Harding has not wanted to bring a baby into the world; yet he smiles when his wife announces that she has some news; she’s pregnant.
Youth and risk
Harding has much to say about youth; the risk of them being exposed to online pornography; of the certainties of the criminal justice system that can jar compared with the vulnerability of the young, no matter what they’re accused of. It matters because of the cost to society of dealing with violent children, whether detained or not. Society can treat violent children in a ‘pendulum’, as Harding describes; police attend, ‘they section her and take her to the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service’, over and over again, as one foster parent told Harding about one girl.
Truth is complex
The truth, that Harding seeks to put before the court, is complex. Without easy, or any, answers. If a 12-year-old girl is already planning and carrying out acts of violence (throwing a pan of boiling water over a carer, stabbing people), ‘why have the health system and social care been left to pick up the pieces?’, Harding asks about the girl. Why assume that the girl is violent due to trauma, ‘and that it can somehow be hugged away’; why not accept she is responsible for her violence? Harding believes that the girl will progress in her violence; ‘and eventually something really terrible will happen’. She needs a boundary, even if it includes detention; because of ‘the unpleasant truth that children can choose to do bad things’ (page 347). Harding comes to accept that ‘even in children, change was sometimes impossible’ and it was best all round if they were locked up.
Defence case
The book closes by returning to the case set out at the beginning. The youth who killed his aunt had done so in a calculated, planned way. Harding feared that the youth was ‘a very dangerous young man’. Earlier, he wondered if the youth’s family knew that, and even feared for themselves, but chose not to say so. Also getting in the way of understanding crimes is that defence lawyers can always come up with a psychiatrist to back up the case for the defence. Harding gives more evidence; he writes that he could not give his fellow adults the comfort that the youth killed his aunt either due to anger or because of (temporary) psychosis. Nor could we assume that the youth (or anyone doing something extreme) was simply ‘evil’; ‘the human condition is more complicated than that’.
Not guilty
While his wife is in hospital, about to give birth, Harding takes a call from the detective in charge of the case; the jury found the youth not guilty of murder. In other words, the jury agreed with the other psychiatrist. Harding wonders whether the jury ‘simply preferred to believe’ that the violence was driven by the youth’s mental illness rather than by his own choices; that he was sick, not dangerous. Harding concludes with the professional and the personal parts of his life informing one another; young people need love, safe spaces, and boundaries; and even then, the police, justice system and even prison may be called for; we have to accept ‘the unpalatable truth that children can do bad things’.
