One of the UK's foremost forensic psychiatrists has spoken about the 'most disturbing people' she's encountered in 30 years of working with some of the most dangerous criminals, including serial killers.
Dr Gwen Adshead spoke to LADbible about her decades long career in forensic psychiatry, which led to her working in Broadmoor Hospital, which housed a number of patients including Peter Sutcliffe, the 'Yorkshire Ripper'.
She said when he was pointed out to her she 'just saw a man' and that there was 'nothing to see' about him.
"I think that's a really important aspect of forensic psychiatry, when you work with people who've done terrible things it's not necessarily there in their face or their body," Dr Adshead explained.
Advert
"You really have to spend quite a lot of time talking to people before you can get at the states of mind that lead to causing great cruelty and harm to others."
Dr Adshead further spoke about the 'most disturbing people' she'd encountered, and how some of them wouldn't be encountered in the places you might expect.
She said: "I think the most disturbing people I meet are the people who deny any responsibility for what they've done and blame other people.
"So they don't really, you know, 'if only someone had helped me properly'. It's more about 'I'm a good person, the victim was a bad person', these kind of things.
Advert
"I think those are the cases which I find disturbing because it's hard to know how to engage with people who are in denial of reality.
"The kind of situations where I meet this now is not so much in the criminal courts but in family courts, where parents are accused of assaulting or hurting their children.
"I quite often meet men and women who clearly have hurt their children but can't accept it and deny it, they either say it wasn't them or blame somebody else.
"Sometimes they blame the child, that's kind of disturbing."
Advert
As for what she really likes about her work, she said it was 'just so interesting' both in an intellectual and philosophical sense.
Dr Adshead spoke about the possible differences between 'a Nazi prison guard who kills a prisoner' and 'a man who kills his wife because he believes she's unfaithful to him'.
She said she found it 'philosophically fascinating', but even more than that 'it's real'.
"This s**t is real, and the emotions are real, and that's a privilege to get up close and personal with real human beings who are in an extraordinary situation," she said of her years of being a forensic psychiatrist.
Topics: Crime, Mental Health
Joe Harker