One Of Us: Physicians Who Kill

"I have already said that if you kill a doctor, all the doctors are instantly on your neck. But what if the man who does the killing is a physician himself? That complicates the situation most damnably..."

---Foursquare: The Story of a Fourfold Life by John Oliver

I've been reading, along with everybody else, the story of the Army major and psychiatrist Dr. Nidal Hasan who killed thirteen people in a spree shooting at Fort Hood yesterday. Let me say first that I've never met Dr. Hasan and know nothing about him; I have no particular information or insights about this offense beyond what I've read in the media.

The CNN article today interviewed two of Dr. Hasan's patients, who both said nothing but glowing things about him and his care. I've blogged about spree killers before ("Shooter Psychology") but this case is different. It got my thinking about the general issue of physicians who kill.

Physician killers are certainly a relative rarity, but they are not unknown. Dr. Jack Kevorkian is probably the most famous here in the United States, but in the United Kingdom there was the case of Dr. Harold Shipman. Dr. Shipman forged the will of, and then killed, several elderly female patients. Then there was Michael Swango, a serial poisoner who killed his patients specifically so that he could take credit for his heroic "resuscitation" efforts. As far back as 1920 Dr. John Oliver wrote about an anonymous psychiatrist colleague who killed another physician and was found legally insane. The quote at the start of this post is from Dr. Oliver's autobiography were he discussed the case. For anyone really fascinated by the topic, I refer you to the book Demon Doctors: Physician Serial Killers. I haven't read it myself so I can't vouch for it; feel free to write in reviews.

But I digress. Getting back to what happened at Fort Hood, the news reports don't indicate anything to suggest that Dr. Hasan was psychotic, motivated by greed or financial gain or out of a need to be a hero. He wasn't an infantryman who had been exposed to combat and who might have been terrified of going back to a traumatic environment. He was educated and presumably in a better financial and social situation than most of the patients he treated, unlike many of my murderer patients who have burned multiple social bridges prior to the killing.

Regardless, a killing by a physician---particularly by a psychiatrist---creates a bizarre aftermath. The military is sending mental health professionals to counsel the victims and witnesses; I'd be willing to bet those military mental health professionals will be required to check their weapons at the door.

What I Learned Part I

Regular readers know that every year I tweet and blog from the conference of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law. This group of forensic psychiatrists consists of about 1800 of the country's practitioners. Topics are quite diverse and sometimes rather unusual. It's a lot of fun. Here's just a small smattering of factoids I picked up yesterday:

• The "sovereign citizen" defense can prompt a competency eval, but is not a delusion. The sovereign citizen movement is a recognized subculture of people who believe the government has no jurisdiction over them.
• Of 200 defendants cleared by DNA, one-fourth had confessed to the crime.
• According to FBI uniform crime reports, between 2001 to 2009 2.2% of police murders took place while responding to calls involving a mentally ill person.
• The collection and selling of serial killer memorabilia is also a venue for potential fraud.
• President Peter Ash gave an interesting and useful Presidential address about juvenile violent offenders. Persistent juvenile offenders tend to become more impulsive with age, not less. They commit an average of 30 to 70 previous offenses before they are caught for the index violent offense. They differ from adult violent offenders in that they tend to act in groups rather than alone, they commit impulsive rather than planned violence, and their criminal activities tend to be more diverse than adults. There is a .3 correlation between juvenile psychopathy scores and later adult psychopathy, but this only accounts for ten percent of the variance. Translation: most violent juvenile offenders do not become violent adults. Nobody knows for sure why.
• There was frequent discussion of the hazards and pitfalls of involvement in social media, including discussion about using it to impeach or undermine witness credibility. So far though, when questioned nobody had actually seen this happen to an expert witness. Concern seems to be out of proportion to reality.

HIGHLIGHT OF THE DAY:

My favorite part of this first conference day was the luncheon speech by Pete Earley. Mr. Earley is a former Washington Post report and New York Times bestselling author who's son has a serious mental illness. His book Crazy is required reading in my training program. The book is a description of life inside of one state's broken forensic mental health system. He is passionate and compassionate, and a vigorous and outspoken advocate. The audience was clearly captivated by what he had to say, and at sometimes it was frankly hard not to stand up and shout 'amen'! when he made his points. (Take home quotes for me: "Never give up hope! People get better!" and "A single person can change the system.") I was thrilled to finally meet this very warm man whom I admire. And I'm not just saying this because he wrote a blurb for our book!

SUB-HIGHLIGHT:

I attended a presentation about psychiatrists in the media. The panel presented an interesting categorization of activities: psychiatrist as scientist (presenting and interpreting studies), educator, storyteller, celebrity commentator and curbside therapist. I was surprised and flattered to see the home page of Shrink Rap, and the cover of the book, as an example of "psychiatrist as educator" in the media. I'm glad to see we seem to be accomplishing something helpful.


So that's the first day. You can follow me on Twitter (see the sidebar). If you're here at the conference and want to #OccupyAAPL, drop me a note!

What I Learned Part III

• More on social media and medicine today. One survey of a surgery department showed half of residents and faculty had public Facebook accounts and a third posted professional information.
• People are using "mindfulness" therapy to treat sex offenders. No studies on efficacy.
• Offenders with bipolar and psychotic disorders are twice as likely to have more than two additional arrests than non- SMI offenders.
• Some criminal defendants try to claim that the government is a corporation, and that they should be tried under contract law rather than criminal law. This is sometimes called a "straw man defense" and may prompt judges to request a competency assessment.
• Defendants who graduate from mental health courts demonstrate improved life circumstnaces with regard to housing, quality of life, symptoms and compliance. Some studies have shown mental health courts to result in improvement for as many as 78% of defendants.
• Court ordered custody evaluators are more likely to recommend paternal custody if the mother is poor or has a history of psychiatric admissions. They are more likely to recommend maternal custody if the father has a history of arrests.
• No suicide prediction tool has a predictive validity greater than 3%.
• Forty percent of patients given opioids for non-cancer pain misuse their meds, 5% become addicted.
• In the UK people with ASPD may be subject to multiagency public protection agreements, sharing information between government agencies.

Coming up tomorrow:
      Correctional risk management and the forensic sciences sampler. Good luck to everyone without power in the snow!

Podcast 63: The Bystander Effect

These are the topics we talk about:

The Bystander Effect and why people don't call for help when they see violent crimes.  While we don't talk about the events at Penn State, this was the inspiration for this topic.

From this we go on to talk about legislation that has been proposed to make it a crime for health care workers (including shrinks) to not report child abuse.  As is, there are mandatory reporting laws and licensing implications for those who do not report instances of child abuse.

Finally, we move on to happier techy stuff and discuss Depression Rating Apps.

Roy reviewed iTunes apps with the keyword "depression" which met the following criteria: Medical category; a rating of at least 3 stars, and at least 100 ratings. Five apps came up:

• 3D brain (9600 ratings: not a rating tool but a nice 3D map of the brain)
• Sad Scale Lite (800 ratings: uses a Zung depression rating scale)
• DepressionCheck (700 ratings: uses a 27-item validated screen for depression, bipolar, PTSD, and anxiety)
• Moody Me (600 ratings: an emoticon-based mood diary)
• Health through Breathing: Pranayama (300 ratings: not a rating tool, but a highly-rated meditation tool)

[Disclosure: Roy has consulted for M3, the makers of DepressionCheck.]

This podcast is available on iTunes or as an RSS feed or Feedburner feed. You can also listen to or download the mp3 or the MPEG-4 file from mythreeshrinks.com. 

Thank you for listening.

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