It would seem it would be an advantage to pretend to be insane to avoid being found guilty so how do they determine if someone is truly insane or just pretending to be?
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So they’re not really guaging “crazy”. You can act hog wild and still be competent mentally.
They’re trying to figure out if the suspect did anything to mitigate blame being placed on them. The logic behind it being “if the suspect understood it was wrong so much that they hid evidence, told specifically purposeful lies to avoid being blamed or even placed at the scene, etc, they were not in psychosis or any other form of severe disconnect from reality to not understand they were committing a crime”.
The one evaluating a suspect is trying to see if the suspect knew what they did was illegal at any point.
That’s why some people fake schizophrenia – to avoid responsibility.
Not what you know about schizophrenia and what it *genuinely* looks like to disconnect from reality, but for explanation’s sake, imagine someone deadass telling you a story that makes 0 sense after a minute of talking, and they are deadass taking themselves and this story seriously and believe their actions were justifed whether it’s because a voice or god told them to, or because they were acting against some imaginary nefarious entity. Sometimes the storyteller and story won’t even make coherent sense past a sentence or two because they jump around concepts so much.
They still get incarcerated they just get removed from the pool that does labor and moved to the pool that gets scientifically experimented on
There are two kinds of insanity defense.
One is about whether you are competent to stand trial – whether you can behave in court, assist your lawyer in preparing a defense etc. If this is successful, you get committed until you are judged competent, and then you are tried. Not really a benefit to the defendant to fake it just to spend time in an asylum.
The other is claiming that you were temporarily insane at the time you committed the crime. This is basically a guilty plea with a request to consider mitigating circumstances. In this case, your other actions will be used to judge if you were really in your right mind at the time, and things like concealing evidence or anything that indicates that the crime may have been premeditated will work against you. If you try to fake this and fail, you will end up worse off than before, and even if it succeeds, you’ll probably get some psychiatric treatment against your will.
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It’s actually not as advantageous as you might think. Before any criminal case ever even gets to court there are a lot of preliminaries. I have two criminal counts on my record, thankfully very old now, but know how many days I’ve spent in trial? ZERO. Never been to trial. Because I opted to plea down, preempt charges with my own penances as action, and didn’t waste court time. And for it, I got lesser sentences, never spent a day in jail.
If you plead insanity, it’s on the burden of the person pleaing that at the time of the crime there was a psychological cause that prevented them from understanding either the consequences of their actions in that specific momement. There have been a lot of shifts in standards, the last I know of is the Durham rule, which I imagine is outdated now. But now the standards of guilt are reversed, it’s not innocent until proven guilty, it’s guilty but needed to show why one should be innocent. Because you cannot plea both insanity and innoncence.
Thankfully, I work in mental health, but am never called to do this, but the way it is done is by interviews, and conforming to the criteria of insanity where something occurs. It’s not a federal issue (in the US) it’s a state issue so terms can vary from place to place. But also against the defendant, it generally takes more than a personal statement of mens rea, but there needs to be evidence to show it as well.
If you’re in the UK at least, a mental health defense will not get you off with a lighter sentence.
You’ll probably end up with an indefinite sentence (ie you can only be released when it’s judged by a team of psychiatrists that whatever was wrong is sufficiently sorted that you are no longer a danger to the public).
You will also go to a secure mental health facility rather than a prison. The conditions might possibly be better (it depends which one you get sent to vs which prison you would’ve been sent to) but you’re going to be surrounded by other people who are at best challengingly to deal with above and beyond normal prisoners and will probably be taking a fairly strong regimen of medication that absolutely will have side effects.
I’ve been to an acute psych ward this year. They’re not places you want to spend time. I can only imagine the secure versions being significantly worse in every respect.
Folks have explained the court process very well. Specifically to your question of how psychiatrists, psychologists, neuropsychologists and other mental health and neurological professionals determine whether someone is actually insane or is manufacturing symptoms to appear insane, the answer is that the diagnosis of many mental health disorders relies on patient observation as well as psychological and possibly neuropsychological testing.
The major psychological diagnostic tests are similar to the standardized tests that you may have taken in school – they have a lot of questions with multiple choice answers or answers on a scale. For example, a question might be, “From a scale of 0 (not at all) to 5 (all the time) how much of the time do you feel worthless.” Diagnostic tests such as the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) provide a scale that rates the reliability of the patient’s answers – the questions are asked in such a way that it’s possible to score how consistently the patient answers the same question asked in different ways. If there’s a lot of deception on the exam that could mean different things, but one possibility is that a patient is trying to game the test.
The same thing is true of in person interactions. Mental health practitioners are trained in evaluating a person’s behavior, and part of that evaluation is determining whether they’re being truthful in their responses. Deception or answers that deflect from the truth doesn’t automatically mean they’re being malicious, for example it’s pretty common for trauma survivors to understate their trauma (“I know my parents loved me, they just didn’t know how to show it.”). But a professional is not going to just blindly accept symptoms of psychopathy or sociopathy as valid without some backup diagnostic testing. Also, anyone other than a patient who took time to educate themselves very well would likely counterfeit symptoms incorrectly, because the psychiatric symptoms portrayed on TV and in movies are almost universally wrong.
Lastly, as others have said, it’s not like being found incompetent to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity allow you to escape punishment. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in inpatient psychiatric settings due to chronic mental illness, and I guarantee that no one will find the experience pleasing. There are many similarities to prison – lack of freedom to schedule your own day, inability to freely leave the facility, folks who tell you what to do, etc. It’s likely safer than some prisons, but it’s profoundly mentally taxing to see folks actively in the midst of a psychotic break, determined to harm themselves, or otherwise socially scary.
Defense attorney here. Several people have correctly pointed out that insanity isn’t a get-out-of-jail-free card, although it used to be and in some places is still a significant advantage.
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is precisely what you’re asking: *how* to psychiatrists tell when someone is faking it. This phenomenon is known as “malingering,” and exists not just in the criminal justice system, but other arenas, like worker’s comp, where it might be to one’s advantage to fake an illness or play up its symptoms.
There are various techniques to tease out malingering. One is to ask questions that people think they should answer one way, but really shouldn’t. For example, people who hear voices rarely believe that the voices are coming from animals. So you ask that to someone who claims to hear voices, and if he says yes, that’s one data point in favor of malingering rather than genuine psychosis. Obviously, one question isn’t enough, but enough questions like this and you get a pretty good idea.
There was one guy who was crazy, so they sent him to a mental institution. He took meds, became sane, and was released. He was arrested multiple times and released multiple times. He was almost killing people by literally throwing them in front of a bus. Many people felt that authorities should keep him locked up to prevent him from successfully killing someone. I don’t know the follow-up on this person.
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