Wednesday, February 27, 2002

Empathy and responsibility

By GREGORY K. MOFFATT, PH. D
Child's Play

I was doing an interview on a call-in radio program a few months ago when a woman called to criticize me. She said that she was tired of psychologists excusing dysfunctional behavior in the name of mental illness. I'm not sure what I said that gave her that impression, but it doesn't surprise me that people have that impression of psychologists, counselors and social workers.

Dishonest perpetrators and their lawyers have overused the mental illness excuse. However, the fact is many times there are mitigating factors that contribute to the behavior both of adults and of children that should be considered before we pass judgment on them.

For example, I have written extensively in my books about Nathaniel Brazil in Florida, who shot and killed a high school teacher. In his particular case, it appears that he was a reasonably behaved child who made good grades and had no trouble in his past. After several honest attempts to deal with his problems that day, Nathaniel made a terrible mistake that cost a teacher his life and forever altered the course of his own life.

Likewise, Andrea Yates in Texas killed her five children. The fact that she drowned her own children is so appalling that revenge is the first response from the public. Yet it appears very likely to me that Yates, a woman who suffered from significant mental illness and who had a host of other issues that probably contributed to her behavior, was not legally responsible for her actions at the time she killed those innocent children.

I assume that many of you are already angry with me for appearing to excuse the behavior of these two people. I'm not excusing their behavior and I certainly think that some response from the court is necessary in both cases. However, I have spent nearly a decade studying violent crime, murderers, and individuals who comment acts of aggression and I know there is a huge difference between someone like Mark Barton who killed his children, wife, and several others at day trading firms in Atlanta, and a boy like Nathaniel Brazil or a woman like Andrea Yates.

A responsible psychologist never excuses behavior, but rather he seeks to understand it. All of our behaviors are the result of a complicated interaction of social, emotional, physical, and psychological variables. Therefore, we cannot suppose that the same behavior performed by two different people in two differing contexts has the same motive or cause.

Nor can we assume that those two individuals have the same level of culpability. There are too many differences between any two people.

To some degree, we are all responsible for our behaviors, and yet in another way we are all responders to our past. Many things we do are beyond ourawareness and, therefore, to a degree beyond our control.

We do not hold a three-year-old to the same level of accountability as a 15-year-old. We recognize the obvious developmental differences that alter the level of responsibility between the two ages. Likewise, circumstances (psychological, emotional, sociological, or physical) can mitigate the response from the court as it weighs culpability. It is for this reason that we have judges and juries. Part of their responsibility is to make these assessments based on the facts available.

Many times I think justice has been poorly served. Nathaniel Brazil was sentenced to prison until he becomes a legal adult, at which time his sentence will be reviewed. Andrea Yates may get the death penalty. Insanity defenses are rarely successful. I think that both of these perpetrators (alleged in the case of Yates) deserve different sentences. Other perpetrators have gotten off too easy.

My goal as I assess cases like these is not only to understand them, but also to determine how to prevent them from happening again. Our outrage and frustration makes it just as easy to ignore mitigating factors as it is for the dishonest perpetrator to use the insanity defense as an excuse. When we get stopped by the police for a moving violation, most of us have a good "reason" why we shouldn't get a ticket. Likewise, in the case of violent crime, it is easy to cry revenge and to argue that there can be no good excuse when we are not the accused.