The Sunday Mail
The psychiatric tests Pistorius has undergone raise the question of how far our state of mind can absolve us of responsibility for our actions
Most of us have woken at night to an unfamiliar sound. Those who have will know that the grogginess of sleep does little to dampen the surge in adrenaline. The blood turns sour, and in a moment the heart is pounding at a rate that is frightening in itself. This is the “fight or flight” response, the raw material of anxiety. There is a threat abroad: we enter a state of hyper-vigilance.
The ability to experience this condition is the result of millions of years of evolution. The better our fight or flight system, the more likely we are to escape from or overcome an adversary. As with every aspect of our physiology, there is a natural variation in the threshold at which we begin to experience that sense of threat, and certain life events can also make us more sensitive to it.
Last week Oscar Pistorius was sent out of a court in Pretoria to undergo psychiatric tests. These will determine whether any anxiety he experienced on the night he killed his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, was related to an existing problem. If it was, then it is possible he could be absolved of any criminal responsibility for her death.
For most of human history differences in the way we think, feel and behave were thought of as personality traits. When these differences were extreme, the person was labelled mad (or, sometimes, a prophet). But the fearful person – just like the shy person, the disobedient person or the easily distracted person – would not have been considered ill, just one of a range of constitutional types. (There is a parlour game to be played in handing out contemporary diagnoses to characters from literature. Did Heathcliff suffer from oppositional-defiant disorder?)
Today, many of these types have been redefined as medical conditions. This tendency is controversial, but can be the means by which those whose thoughts or feelings make them distressed, or a danger to themselves or others, get help. What is increasingly clear is that it has seismic implications for the law.
The principle that an altered state of mind can excuse a crime is built into many legal systems. The cause could be drink, a brain tumour that distorts judgment, or an episode of mental illness. But as the empire of psychiatric diagnoses expands, taking in ever finer variations in personality, this will become much more difficult to navigate.
The argument isn’t new: lawyers have long argued over what constitutes an impairment of reason. What is changing is the ability of scientists to identify tiny differences in the brains and bodies of subjects, and link those to behaviour. A cultural bias to “hard” data means that the biological carries more weight than the biographical with jurors and judges (although the two are inextricably linked). If a brain tumour can be used as a defence, then why not poor functioning in the pre-frontal cortex, or reduced blood flow in the angular gyrus? In the US the number of judicial opinions citing neurological evidence has increased by several hundred percent since 2005, according to Nita Farahany, professor of law and philosophy at Duke University.
Judgment is certainly altered by anxiety. The levels of important neurotransmitters may change and, over time, the mass of certain structures in the brain too. We cannot know what an unanxious version of Pistorius would have done that night. The question is absurd, though, as the Pistorius we are dealing with is anxious. Should that person not be held to account for any crime he may have committed?
With our ability to scrutinise the brain improving all the time, it will become more and more difficult to maintain the fiction that the mind and body operate separately. But as the line between disease and personality blurs, traditional ideas of blame and responsibility could start to fall apart. Should we then abandon blame?
Gwen Adshead, a consultant at Broadmoor hospital, has written that “as clinicians we know mental illness does not necessarily abolish the capacity to form meaningful and competent intentions”. For her part Farahany believes that moral accountability is essential, even if we get to a point where we can closely map behaviour to biology. “We have some self-direction,” she says.
“While it may be limited, we are still clearly capable of making some decisions. And without blame, society can’t stigmatise the decisions and actions it wants to prevent.”
New scientific techniques make the correlations between biology and behaviour much clearer. But until we are ready to give up the idea of a mind that can choose, even in its darkest moments, blame will have to be part of the story.—Guardian.
