Shrunk
Crime and Disorders of the Mind
- Publisher
- Durvile Publications
- Initial publish date
- Nov 2016
- Category
- General
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780994735201
- Publish Date
- Nov 2016
- List Price
- $29.95
-
Downloadable audio file
- ISBN
- 9780995232273
- Publish Date
- Dec 2017
- List Price
- $29.95
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Where to buy it
Recommended Age, Grade, and Reading Levels
- Age: 18
- Grade: 12
Description
Shrunk: Crime and Disorders of the Mind is a collection of powerful stories by Canadian and international forensic psychologists and psychiatrists who write about the many complex mental health issues they face and the care involved in dealing with them. Unlike any other book within the genre of True Crime, Shrunk forms a unique bridge between mental health and law. Chapters focus on cases where judges and juries call upon the opinions of forensic experts when dealing with the mentally disordered criminally accused. Edited by scholar Dr. Lorene Shyba and psychologist Dr. J. Thomas Dalby, with a Foreword by Dr. Lisa Ramshaw, Shrunk is written and edited to appeal to medical and legal professionals; students of medicine, psychology, and law; and the interested general public. Shrunk is the second book in Durvile Publications’ ‘True Cases’ series, following Tough Crimes: True Cases by Top Canadian Criminal Lawyers.
About the authors
Lorene Shyba PhD is publisher at Durvile & UpRoute Books and series editor of the Durvile True Cases series.
J. Thomas Dalby's profile page
Lisa Ramshaw, MD, DPhil, FRCPC, is a staff psychiatrist and deputy clinical director in the law and mental health program at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and an assistant professor and program director for the sub-specialty program in forensic psychiatry at the University of Toronto. She is also a member of the Ontario Review Board, a consultant psychiatrist in Nunavut, and previously worked as a consultant forensic psychiatrist at the Oak Ridge Site of the mental health centre in Penetanguishene (now Waypoint Centre for Mental Health Care). Her clinical practice is in forensic psychiatry, and includes assessments of criminal responsibility, fitness to stand trial, risk of violence and sexual violence, and assessments and care of high-risk individuals under the jurisdiction of the Ontario Review Board and the Nunavut Review Board.
Sven Christianson's profile page
Patrick Baillie is a psychologist and lawyer based in Calgary, Alberta. He completed his doctoral degree in psychology in 1992 and was hired by the Forensic Assessment and Outpatient Services as part of what is now known as Alberta Health Services. Since 1995, he has been a consulting psychologist with the Calgary Police Service. In 2006, he appeared as an expert witness before the Commission of Inquiry into the Wrongful Conviction of David Milgaard. In March 2010, Dr. Baillie was admitted as a member of the Law Society of Alberta, having focused his legal studies on issues at the intersection of the law and mental health. He has been the chair of the Discipline Committee of the College of Alberta Psychologists, chair of the Mental Health and the Law Advisory Committee for the Mental Health Commission of Canada, and chair of the Accreditation Panel of the Canadian Psychological Association.
Patrick Baillie's profile page
Donald Dutton received his PhD in psychology from the University of Toronto in 1970. After receiving training as a group therapist at the Cold Mountain Institute, he co-founded the Assaultive Husbands Project in 1979, a court-mandated treatment program for men convicted of wife assault. He has published over a hundred papers and five books, including the Domestic Assault of Women (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995), The Batterer: A Psychological Profile (New York: Basic Books, 1995), The Abusive Personality (New York: Guilford Press, 2006), Rethinking Domestic Violence (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), and The Psychology of Genocide, Massacres, and Extreme Violence (Santa Barbara: Praeger Security International, 2007). The Batterer has been translated into French, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, and Polish. Don Dutton has frequently served as an expert witness in civil trials involving intimate abuse and in criminal trials involving violence. He is currently professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia.
BARRY COOPER is a professor of political science at the University of Calgary and the author of more than twenty-five books, including Deconfederation: Canada without Quebec and The End of History. He has a regular column in the Calgary Herald and other newspapers; his journalism has appeared in The Globe and Mail and The National Post. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Jeffrey Waldman's profile page
Lawrence Ellerby's profile page
Excerpt: Shrunk: Crime and Disorders of the Mind (edited by Lorene Shyba; by (author) J. Thomas Dalby, Sven Christianson, Patrick Baillie, Jack White, Joel Watts, Louise Olivier, Stephen Porter, Donald Dutton, Barry Cooper, Marc Nesca, Jeffrey Waldman, Lawrence Ellerby, Richard Schneider, David Dawson & William Trudell; foreword by Lisa Ramshaw)
Dr. Donald Dutton
The Carnation Killers, Folie à deux
On Christmas Eve 2007 in Carnation, Washington, a small town northeast of Seattle, Joe McEnroe and his live-in girlfriend, Michele Anderson sat down for dinner with Michele’s parents, Wayne and Judy Anderson. Joe and Michele hadn’t travelled far for the Christmas meal as they lived in a trailer a short distance from the parents’ home, on the parents’ property. Before enjoying their dinner, the family, including Joe, awaited the arrival of Michele’s brother Scott, Scott’s wife Erica, and their two children, Olivia and Nathan. While they were waiting for the rest of the family to arrive, Michele drew a gun and shot at Wayne but her gun jammed. Wayne, who was large man, charged at Michele and at that point, Joe drew his gun and shot Wayne. Then, apologizing to Judy, he shot her in the chest. Both were killed. Michele and Joe dragged Wayne and Judy’s bodies into a shed and re-commenced their wait for Michele’s brother and family. When Scott and his family arrived, Michele shot her brother Scott once. Then her gun jammed again so Joe shot Scott and Erica. To finish off the destruction, Joe shot the two children.
Joe and Michele left the four bodies where they lay and drove in circles for twenty-four hours in a state of confusion; driving south in an attempt to flee to Canada, instead of heading north to the border. Finally, they were stopped by the police near the crime scene and appeared flustered when asked routine questions. When taken into custody and interviewed by the police, they both admitted to the killings. Rationalizing the killing of the children, they said, “there would be no one left to care for them.” Eventually both Joe and Michele were charged with Aggravated Homicide which can carry a death sentence in Washington State. Both Michele and Joe faced the Death Penalty and were to be tried separately.
In March of 2008, about three months after the killings, I was contacted by Katy Ross and Bill Prestia, public defenders in Seattle who were representing Joe. I am a forensic psychologist who has appeared in many homicide cases, many of which involved a potential death sentence for the perpetrators. The most high profile of these was the O.J. Simpson case, where I was an expert for the prosecution.
I saw a newspaper photo of Joe and he looked Satanic—shoulder-length dark hair and a strange look in his eye. I expected the worst. I began the first of fifteen interviews with Joe in March of 2008 and these would continue until 2015 when he was finally tried for murder in Seattle. The interviews all took place in the King County Jail in downtown Seattle. I came to know the place well; the numerous locked doors and the routine of getting to a locked interview room and then having Joe brought in with wrist and ankle cuffs by two burly guards.
Encountering Joe
My first encounter with Joe defied whatever expectations I had formed based on the newspaper photo and description of the crime. He was excessively timid and had a speech impediment—he could not pronounce the letter ‘r’. Joe was also medicated during much of his pre-trial incarceration and was on strong anti-depressants. He experienced unrelenting guilt over the killings, and found it difficult, even after some time had passed, to describe the killing of the children, Olivia and Nathan Anderson.
The first interviews focussed on his upbringing; he was raised by his mother in California and he had never known his father. His mother had a penchant for men, she would even bring them home from the streets—men who were described by Joe as having a sign reading ‘will work for food’—and have loud sex with them in the tiny bachelor apartment she shared with Joe and his two siblings. Only a blanket separated the children from the loud sex.
Joe was basically put in charge of caring for and raising his siblings, since his mother was either out working or out looking for men. Joe’s unkempt appearance at school led to an investigation, when he was fourteen, by Santa Clara County, California Child Protective Services. The investigation report read, in part, “the family appears quite dysfunctional…no parent to provide. Child left alone unattended by mother…. Home was unclean and unsafe.” In this home environment, Joe began to withdraw and retreat into himself; first to television, then to the Internet.
Over the next several years, his mother brought home a series of disturbed and sometimes abusive boyfriends, many of whom were ex-cons. The typical pattern was they would live at her place, not work, drink and/or use whatever drugs they could find, and counsel Joe on the meaning of life. The relationship would break up and Joe’s mother would go in search of a replacement. Joe was in a constant pattern of being “the man of the house,” being abandoned when the new man-hunting search began, then being replaced by a new boyfriend.
According to Joe, when these new boyfriends came into the family, Joe was shaped into a protective role; he never knew how much threat each of them presented for his mother. The family moved around the country—from California and Washington, to Arizona—all at the whims of his mother’s search for a man. Joe would try in the midst of all this to go to school but was repeatedly harassed and bullied for his cheap clothes and speech impediment. He never disclosed this to his mother—she wasn’t interested.
Joe had no memories of ever being soothed or supported by his mother. Instead, he developed a psychological response to serve that necessary function; his personality split into entities—quasi-hallucinatory experiences that became chronic and vivid and visited him during times of stress. These were ‘entities,’ that is, distinct personas who looked like Joe but were of both sexes and had names. Their names included Crowe, Melissa, Void, and God and each had distinct personalities—Melissa was playful and wise, for example, and knew Joe from a previous life.
Joe worked at odd jobs outside of school to help support the family—he had to pay all the utility bills on his five-dollars-an-hour pay. At age twenty-one, Joe saw a chance to leave because his mother had finally found a semi-respectable mate. Joe’s emancipation took him to North Carolina where he got a job stocking shelves in a Target store. He had no close friends; he had a couple of roommates but hardly knew them. He would go online and on two occasions met women who seemed interested in him. In both cases, he took time off work and flew out to other cities to meet them. Each time they rejected him, and as he described it to me, this left him depressed and suicidal. All his time away from work was spent online. His only friends were his entities who visited him during times of extreme stress and served a soothing function—calming him and, on more than one occasion, preventing him from committing suicide. Joe called them his ‘spirit guides’ but didn’t tell anyone about them for fear of being thought to be crazy.
Joe’s third try at finding a girlfriend online was with a woman named Michele Anderson. They seemed to like the same type of action flick movies, played the same computer games, and both had spirit guides. This shared spirit guide experience was a strong draw for Joe because he could now share his secret entities with someone who would not ridicule him. Joe flew to Seattle from North Carolina to meet Michele and he couldn’t help noticing that she was quite a bit heavier than in her pictures. He inadvertently let this slip to her and she never let him forget it.
Michele had a dominating personality and she had tirades against the people in the world who she felt were disrespecting her; mainly people at work but also her family. Joe noticed that Michele took every conflict as a slight and every slight as someone ‘dissing’ her. She would then ruminate on it. In fact, she took to keeping ‘hit lists’ of people she wanted to kill, as she put it, “to make the world a better place.” Joe simply placated her and tried to avoid confrontations, but she would blow up over minor conflicts like his speech impediment or his failing to clean the refrigerator. Her tirades would last for hours. Each minor conflict was a sign to Michele that she was being dissed again.
Editorial Reviews
The workings of a criminally disordered mind has always been a fascinating subject for experts and lay persons alike. What causes someone such as Clifford Olsen to become probably the most evil serial murderer in Canadian history? How do trials play out for these individuals? Does our prison system simply throw away the key after they are incarcerated or is it worthwhile to attempt to rehabilitate such persons? Canadian and international psychiatrists and psychologists answer interestingly such questions in Shrunk, through their writings of true cases.
—Earl Levy QC, Barrister
This highly readable and fascinating book provides unique and personal insights into all-too-real instances in which unbridled mental disorder resulted in tragedy and loss, and wreaked havoc in the lives of perpetrators, victims, and their families. The book provides a glimpse into the often-hidden, troubled, and dark side of human behaviour. The compelling accounts of crimes committed by mentally ill offenders are told by experienced and highly respected psychologists and psychiatrists on the front-lines of the highest-profile mental disorder cases. Shrunk’s authentic portrayal of what mental illness is really like, and what it can do to people, sets it apart from any other book of crime stories.”
—Dr. Hy Bloom, LLB, MD, FRCPC, Consultant in Forensic Psychiatry
Scholarly inquiries into discrimination in Canadian society tend to concentrate on race and ethnicity, with occasional reference to physical disability. This traditionally narrow focus eclipses the legacy of systemic discrimination experienced by persons with mental disabilities, particularly those accused of a crime. Skewed public perceptions and social prejudices about mentally ill offenders have resulted. In turn, justice for such offenders is at risk. The practical experiences of the contributors to Shrunk: Crime and Disorders of the Mind, told in an easy-to-read format, go a long distance to correct those perceptions and mitigate those prejudices, particularly for the average citizen. This book should be on everyone’s must-read list.
—John Rosen, Rosen Naster Barristers
Experiencing an enduring mental illness is a profound personal struggle that I would not wish on anyone! Shrunk: Crime and Disorders of the Mind promotes awareness, knowledge, and understanding of the complexities in diagnosing, treating, and supporting the recovery of those living with a mental illness who come in conflict with the justice system. Shrunk contains true and painful stories of lives tormented by mental illness and criminalization, their victims, and the families who suffer alongside them. And yet, this volume offers the hope that therapeutic jurisprudence works and that recovery is possible in living beyond the limitations of mental illness with meaning and purpose. But it takes the support of a caring community. A caring community that is informed and knowledgeable. Shrunk takes the reader behind the scenes of disordered minds, disabling mental health systems, and despairing families and victims by dispelling myths and misunderstandings. For many this will be a distressful and uncomfortable read, but for every reader an illuminating and elucidating one.
—Chris Summerville, CEO, Schizophrenia Society of Canada,
The psychological and psychiatric forensic experts I encountered over decades of criminal law practice, both as Crown prosecutor and defence counsel, whether consulted by myself or by opposing counsel, were invariably highly qualified, experienced, principled and objective. Shrunk: Crime and Disorders of the Mind describes the diligence and commitment of these forensic experts who intervene before and at trial on the issue of fitness to stand trial, possibly providing evidence that the accused is not criminally responsible. It was gratifying to work in many cases with such exemplary professionalism.
C.D. Evans QC, Barrister
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