Author: vaughanbell

There are not enough quality forensic psychology blogs in the world, which I suspect is not a thought that passes through the mind of anyone except Mind Hacks readers.

However, if you’re after a punchy fast paced look at the world of criminal and legal psychology you’d do far worse than checking out the website of psyDoctor8.

It dips into everything from the neuroscience of murder to the science of false confessions with an eye on both the media and the academic literature.

And if you do Twitter @PsyDoctor8 is also a great source of links in the same vein.

It makes a wonderful complement to the more in-depth In the News blog, which has consistently been one of the best forensic psychology sources on the net.

And that’s about it. Criminal really.

Yes your honour, I’ll stop with the puns.
 

Link to psyDoctor8 blog.
Link to In the News blog.

Urbanite has a fascinating article on researchers who are attempting to map drug users’ minds onto the city streets.

They are giving addicts GPS-enabled PDAs that ask the participants to rate their psychological state as they move around Baltimore.

By using pre-existing maps of the city that chart things like neighbourhood poverty and local drug availability it’s possible to see how the mental state of users changes as they move through the different physical and social environments of the city.

To make the patterns of movement meaningful, the researchers have to understand the various city “environments” that the drug users move through. This job fell to Craig, the biostatistician and a Baltimore native. To create maps of the urban landscape, Craig started with Census indices, which include race, income, and other socioeconomic metrics. To those he added a system developed by Dr. Debra Furr-Holden at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, who sent teams out to score city blocks based on physical characteristics (broken windows, shell casings, street memorials for recent killings) and on people’s behavior (clearly intoxicated adults, unsupervised children, and so on). “Her data are like nothing else I’ve ever seen,” says Epstein.

On these maps, Craig plots the paths of drug users as they move through the city, weaving in the information they’ve plugged into their PDAs. The result is a detailed rendering of how addiction is lived in space and time, opening a new window on the experience of tens of thousands of city residents. “Their work is novel,” says Yale University’s Rajita Sinha, professor of psychiatry and child study and director of the Yale Stress Center. This research “allows us to understand the social context in which drug use takes place and to evaluate that context,” says Sinha, who is internationally known for her pioneering research on the mechanisms linking stress to addiction.

The technique is called ‘ecological momentary assessment’ – although it is similar to a closely related method called ‘experience sampling’ that also involves giving participants an electronic device that requires they record their mental state at various points in their daily life.

These techniques have been around since the early 90s but the new aspect is the incorporation of GPS to map these responses into physical space.

One of the pioneers of this technique has been, not a scientist, but the artist Christian Nold, who has been making emotion maps of cities for many years to beautiful effect.

The Urbanite article covers how a team from the US National Institute on Drug Abuse are attempting perhaps the most ambitious and data-rich version of this approach to date which truly attempts to blend both inner and outer worlds.
 

Link to article ‘On the Trail of Addiction’.

Jay Traver had begun to notice an uncomfortable crawling sensation under her skin. Scalp spots had bothered her for years but despite her best efforts – she was, after all, a renowned professor of zoology – she couldn’t identify the parasites.

Over the seasons the bugs had spread across her body and eventually invaded her eyes, ears and nostrils, raising her discomfort to fever pitch. Doctors seemed mystified but by the summer of 1950 she had made a breakthrough.

Strong caustic soaps seemed to help control the infestation and she had dug some of the bugs out of her skin with her nails to identify them as dermatophagoides – a mite never previously known to infect humans.

Although lacking a cure she wrote of her discovery and experiences as an article for the scientific journal Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington which later appeared in their February 1951 issue.

It is perhaps one of the most remarkable scientific papers ever published, not, as it turns out, because of the startling new discovery, but because the Professor had never been infected by parasites.

The bugs were hallucinated, the infestation a delusion and Travers was suffering from a mental illness.

Known as delusional parasitosis the condition consists of the usually focused delusion that the person is infected by parasites that crawl under the skin and which remain present in the surrounding environment.

Patients often turn up to doctors with small bugs in plastic bags which later turn out to be dust, irrelevant bugs or even just flakes of human skin.

Extensive damage is common as patients apply stronger and stronger solutions to the skin or use sharps objects to dig out what they assume are parasites below the surface of their body.

Professor Traver’s article reports these experiences in detail and even has photos of the supposed ‘dermatophagoides’ mites – which were identified by others as common house dust mites that only live on dry skin that has flaked off the body.

Tellingly, the article described how, after an admission to hospital where no parasites were found, Traver was referred to a neurologist for what was apparently labelled a “psychoneurotic condition”. Dismissing the diagnosis she quickly ducked the appointment.

The scientific paper has become a little-known classic for students of obscure psychiatric conditions. In a recent article on the condition, entomologist Nancy Hinkle hailed it as “one of the most astounding first-person accounts of Ekbom’s syndrome” available but the paper has a more profound point.

Hinkle notes that “her experience illustrates that even highly educated scientists accustomed to dealing with facts and evidence are not immune to delusions”.

We like to think that our convictions are based on reasoned conclusions and that all of our beliefs are subject to the searchlights of self-inquiry, but we are only experts as far as we are allowed by our own minds.

Like a Wizard of Oz that never got found out, we cannot see the man behind the curtains and even knowing he is there doesn’t let us detect him at work.

Professor Jay Traver lived with her delusions for 31 years, right up until her death.
 

pdf of Traver’s 1951 paper.
Link to annoyingly pay-gated Hinkle paper on delusional parasitosis.

The Guardian has a fascinating article about the motivations of people who have faked terminal illnesses as their online companions have offered support and sympathy right until the supposed end.

Several cases have become notorious online where illnesses, and even deaths, have been faked much to the betrayal of community members.

Mandy is one of a growing number of people who pretend to suffer illness and trauma to get sympathy from online support groups. Think of Tyler Durden and Marla Singer in Fight Club, only these support groups are virtual, and the people deceived are real. From cancer forums to anorexia websites, LiveJournal to Mumsnet, trusting communities are falling victim to a new kind of online fraud, one in which people are scammed out of their time and emotion instead of their money. The fakers have nothing to gain from their lies – except attention.

These aren’t just people with a sick sense of humour. Jokers want a quicker payoff than this kind of hoax could ever provide. It requires months of sophisticated research to develop and sustain a convincing story, as well as a team of fictitious personas to back up the web of deceit. Psychiatrists say the lengths to which people like Mandy are prepared to go mean their behaviour is pathological, a disorder rather than simply an act of spite. The irony is these people might actually be classed as ill – just not in the way they claim to be.

This type of behaviour can be diagnosed as facticious disorder in the DSM with the idea that the motivation is to gain the psychological benefits of the ‘sick role’ – i.e. a caring response from other people.

It is considered a mental illness and is sometimes labelled Munchausen syndrome after the German Baron who was famous for his tall tales.

However, faking illness to get material benefits or to avoid responsibilities is classified as malingering is not considered a mental illness, although no justification is usually given for why one is considered an illness and the other just ‘bad behaviour’.

To complicate matters further, it seems some people can experience serious medical problems (e.g. paralysis, blindness) with nothing seeming to be wrong with them – but crucially – they are not doing so consciously.

In other words, they are not ‘faking’ in the normal sense of the word and these conditions are typically diagnosed as conversion disorder.

If they sound exotic, about 10-20% of all neurology examinations turn up no damage that could explain the symptoms.

Considering we have all faked or exaggerated illness to some degree, and the fact that our unconscious mind has a powerful effect on the experience of symptoms – regardless of their physical basis, we can consider terminal illness fakers as one end of a behaviour spectrum on which we all live.

The Guardian article looks at the increasingly recognised online expression of this behaviour (with the inevitable unnecessary suggestion of an online specific diagnosis) and some fascinating individual cases.

 
Link to article ‘Faking illness online’.