Forensic Psychology For Dummies (109 page)
Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
Another term sometimes used is
equivocal death analysis,
but this usually refers to an examination carried out by law enforcement agents rather than forensic psychologists. Equivocal death analysis is particularly prevalent in military situations where the complexity and dangerousness of what’s going on, sometimes aggravated by ‘the fog of war’, can raise many important questions about how someone died. I describe one notorious example in the sidebar ‘Equivocal death analysis’.
Conducting a psychological autopsy is fraught with difficulties, not least because the person who could answer many of the key questions is dead! In addition, if a murder inquiry is in progress, legal hurdles may be put in the way of interviewing all the people who have some knowledge of the dead person (and, of course, the prosecution and defence are likely to have access to different sets of witnesses, who may hold opposing views). If suicide is an issue, the people close to the dead person may be unwilling to give full and frank information (they may feel some guilt if the person killed himself and so be keen to support belief in some other cause that exonerates them).
Conducting psychological autopsies into possible suicides
In order to help explain a psychological autopsy, in this section I discuss the various aspects that have to be considered in order to produce a report on a suicide. The psychological processes considered when examining the possibility of suicide draw on four dominant processes: stressors, exposure, availability of lethal agents and psychopathology.
Stressors
An important consideration in any fatality is the circumstances surrounding the event, in particular any indication of the stressors that the deceased may have suffered. Studies show that people who attempt suicide often experienced significant life stressors in the four weeks prior to the attempt. The weakness in these studies, however, is the lack of careful exploration of people with similar stressors who don’t attempt suicide, or of the surrounding social and family circumstances that may consistently be associated with the stressors. Without such knowledge, the pre-existence of stressors in an examination of an equivocal death may be given too much weight.
Exposure
Police inquiries, as well as more systematic studies, suggest that teenage suicides in particular may be more likely after direct exposure to another suicide through family or friends, or indirect exposure from media coverage. If, for instance, the person had been consistently brooding on the event, a safe assumption is that at the very least it focused their thoughts. Such intense analysis may also provide ideas about the actual mechanics for carrying out their suicide.
Studies indicate that the latter situation sometimes seems to be the case when what may be considered ‘unorthodox’ means of suicide are used, such as setting fire to oneself or laying one’s head on a railway track. Enough examples exist of minor ‘epidemics’ of suicides following initial, widely publicised incidents using the same method to support the contention that some individuals decide
how
to commit suicide from these exemplars.
A particularly disturbing illustration of this sort of ‘copycat’ suicide is exhibited by the spree killers I mention in Chapter 6. These people almost invariably end up being killed or killing themselves as part of their killing spree. Evidence suggests that some increase in this sort of suicide occurs when a similar event is highly publicised, such as the Columbine school shootings in the US.
A morbid fascination with a suicide event can certainly be taken as indication that the deceased had at least considered the implications of taking their own life. And if the experience of the suicide was more direct – or the deceased thought in some way that the original suicide was positively regarded or in some senses ‘heroic’ – it can be considered to have had the effect of ‘validating’ the planned action.
Inevitably, however, the simple extrapolation from a deceased having had exposure to another’s suicide and their own subsequent death involves many difficulties. You have to be cautious about assuming that a suicide, or suspicious death, imitates a related event in some way. For a start, you need to be sure that the deceased was aware of the example they’re supposed to have imitated! And if no other evidence exists – say in a suicide note or comments before death – that the deceased admired the original suicide (or saw the act as appropriate in some way), the idea of a person replicating the event has less strength.
Availability of lethal agents
No, lethal agents doesn’t refer to those dubious characters who represent highly-paid footballers! In this case,
lethal agents
are the means by which people can kill themselves.
Many experts believe that ready and easy access to a quick cause of death, the most notably being a firearm, increases the risk of suicide. Such access would certainly be expected to reduce the number of cases in which a person survives a suicide attempt, because failure is simply less likely. The chances of a person being discovered before the effects of an overdose become fatal, or of not taking enough pills, don’t apply when the pulling of a gun trigger is all that’s needed.
In fact, you will find it difficult in the UK to buy some pills in a bottle if taking lots of those pills would kill you. Instead, you have to buy them in one of those blister packs that takes some doing to open. There does seem to be evidence that people who want to kill themselves by taking lots of pills often can’t be bothered to fight with lots of blister packs!
Psychopathology
One of the major assumptions made in guiding an equivocal death investigation is that any evidence of prior
psychopathology
(which is some form of mental illness or other psychological disturbance) can be taken as an indicator of the probability that a person took their own life. Because this area of interest is such a natural part of psychiatric assessment, the various structured protocols that have been developed to elicit indications of mental illness (that I describe in Chapter 9) have been adapted for use with surviving parents and family in an attempt to complete a psychological autopsy as if the deceased is present.
Signs of depression, or previous acts of self-harm, provide support for suicide as opposed to accidental death – even if no direct signs of depression in the deceased are available. Many studies also show that if close relatives have had mental problems, then it’s important to consider whether there’s the possibility of early stage depression developing or unrecognised aspects of mental disturbance, in the person whose death is equivocal.
What to make of a diagnosis of schizophrenia or personality disorder, however, is more difficult. Where a severe psychosis is apparent, the borderline between accidental and intentional self-destruction is wide and vague. Was the person lucid enough at the time to be aware of the
full
consequence of their actions? Even though the person had expressed a desire to commit suicide, were they
fully
cognisant of what that meant?
An extreme, but useful, example of the difficulties of using information on psychopathology in an equivocal death investigation, is any case referred to as ‘suicide by cop’. In such situations, a person creates a confrontation with the police that inevitably leads to being gunned down in a shoot-out.
British police officers may well be aware that the person they’re surrounding in a siege is potentially suicidal and therefore try to avoid giving him the opportunity to get them to execute him. In some US jurisdictions, however, fewer qualms may exist, or at least, less understanding of the possible psychopathology of the offender they’re trying to disarm.