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The Reith Lectures 2024

with Dr Gwen Adshead

Four Questions about Violence

2. But Aren’t They All Evil?

ANITA ANAND: Welcome to the second of this year’s Reith lectures with
forensic psychiatrist Dr Gwen Adshead, in her series about how we might better
understand and manage violence. Today, we’re in Scotland at the V&A Museum in

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Dundee, designed by Kengo Kuma, this building is a really striking architectural

addition to the banks of the River Tay, and is an important part of this city’s
regeneration story. Scotland has had jurisdiction over crime and punishment, so
just how much of a difference has this made when it comes to managing the type
of violence which destroys not just individual lives, but the hope of generations
and society at large. It’s a highly sensitive and difficult subject, but one which our
lecturer will address in this series entitled “Four Questions About Violence.” She’s
spent a lifetime working inside prisons talking to some of those who’ve committed
terrible acts of violence, including, but not exclusively, murder. And one of the
most common questions that she is asked is, but aren’t they all evil? Let’s hear
what she has to say. Please welcome the BBC 2024 Reith lecturer Dr Gwen
Adshead.

[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]

DR GWEN ADSHEAD: Good evening. I have done evil things, but does that
make me evil? I have heard this question many times from the patients I work with
as a forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist. Typically, I begin my answer by
telling them that evil is a complex idea, and that saints, sociologists, theologians
and neuroscientists all have had something to say about it. But then I say to them,
as I intend to say to you today, that the capacity for evil is present in all of us. As
William Blake said, “Cruelty has a human heart.” Just as I say to my patients, I am
going to say in this lecture that we therefore must attend to that capacity in
ourselves, and study its components closely, because it is possible for each and
every one of us to get into a state of mind that could be called evil. I will also
suggest that we need to manage our own capacity for evil by cultivating and
practising our capacity for goodness, which is both protective against evil and
healthy in its own right.

I’ve had to think about this issue in my work because historically there has
been some confusion about mental illness and evil, and an implication that they
are somehow connected. For example, hospitals like Broadmoor used routinely to
be described as places that house evil people. This false association extends even
to the buildings, as we saw in the early summer of this year when some of the old
19th century buildings that used to be Broadmoor Hospital caught on fire. The
immediate reportage was all about the violent men who used to live there, most
of whom are long dead. No mention of the firefighters, or local householders who
might be at risk, or of the many men and women who successfully engaged in
treatment in those buildings and who were enabled to either return to prison to
pay their debt to society or to be rehabilitated safely in the community.

As I said in my first lecture, what I’m always struck by when I meet someone
who has done a horrible thing is initially their ordinariness; and then, as they tell

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their story, the sense of a terrible intersection of chance and choices that led up to
the offence, such that I usually feel that there but for the grace of God go I. Often
the only major difference between us is their long experience of severe mental
illness, which sometimes results in people feeling possessed or compelled by an
inner network of chaotic and disorganised thoughts and feelings. Such emotions
and thoughts are aggravated by alcohol and drug intoxication, and also intense
levels of fear and distress which distort people’s sense of reality.

I guess we could think of the men and women I’ve seen in my work as
people who were driven into evil states of mind by a fatal combination of mental
illness, addiction and different kinds of stress. Whatever the combination of risk
factors, the violence committed by the people in our secure psychiatric hospitals
and prisons seems far from ordinary. Especially when we consider that the vast
majority of people with mental illness, even severe mental illness, pose no risk of
harm to anyone else.

I sometimes think of the people I work with as the human version of a

natural disaster. As one of our patients said recently, “I was like a tornado in the
path of my victim.” Poetry, drama and history tell us that ordinary men and women
can get into evil states of mind. The poet W.H. Auden describes evil as,
“Unspectacular and always human,” and the historian Christopher Browning called
his study of the German soldiers who killed thousands of innocent civilians,
“Ordinary Men.” Browning’s work is a must read for anyone who is interested in the
evil state of mind, and one of his most interesting findings is that not all these men
felt the same about their murderous orders. Only about a third of the soldiers
seemed to relish their task, about a third obedience, leaving about a third who
resisted by seeking transfer away from this detail. It has been suggested that the
emotional impact of this type of killing on military moral was reported to the Nazi
high command and was one factor that led to the development of the technology
of mass murder and the death camps.

The statistics of sentencing for homicides show that only a minority of

people are found to be mentally unwell at the time of the killing, and that most
perpetrators are seen as ordinary people who killed for an ordinarily unpleasant
reason. That does not mean that ordinary homicide perpetrators are all unfeeling
and cold. Many perpetrators experience painful and disturbing emotions, and the
killing provides some sense of release. But then afterwards the same people who
have killed also suffer remorse and distress, especially those who kill family
members, and they are known to be at increased risk of suicide. Parents who kill
their children are at especially high risk of suicide later, a risk that persists for
years.

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I shall never forget the young mother who killed her children while
suffering from a postnatal mental illness. She was sent to hospital for treatment,
but recovery brought intolerable insight and distress. We knew she was at high risk
of suicide, even as we planned for her return to the community, and sure enough
she took her own life on her release some 10 years after her offence.

I am also thinking of all those young men who are killed by other young
men. For the year ending February 2024, 71% of homicide victims in England and
Wales were male, and the same percentage is seen in Scotland, but in England and
Wales it is the youngest men whose risk of being a victim is higher than the national
average, especially those aged 16 to 24. They kill and they die in an aroused and
intoxicated state of mind that goes looking for a fight. A state of mind that is both
dreadful and ordinary. It is a state of mind which is generally quite unlike the state
of mind we call evil. So, what are the factors that make up the evil state of mind? I
think there are seven psychological elements which are distinct but related to each
other. It is rare for all these factors to be present all at once, but a certain number
of them are probably essential for more extreme cruelty to take place.

The first factor are what are called cognitive distortions. That is the
disturbance of the ordinary capacity for flexible and nuanced thinking, especially
in a social context both small and large scale. A key aspect of cognitive distortion
is rigidity of thinking about others, and absolute certainty about their beliefs about
the world.
I am thinking here of those men who believe that they can tell what a
woman is thinking, or those who believe that the world is divided into winners and
losers. In such a state of mind there is no capacity to tolerate uncertainty or
ambiguity, to say I don’t know what’s going on here. Such distortions are further
aggravated by how information is weighed, and the discounting of any information
that contradicts one’s thinking.

Psychological rigidity and exclusion of uncertainty contribute to the

development of the second factor of an evil state of mind, which is hyper
individualism and egocentricity. This is a mental perspective in which other
people’s minds are neither real nor morally significant. This certainty and
egocentricity then fuel the third factor, which is the entitlement to control and
power over others which is absolute. I read recently about the trial of a man in his
early 20s who attacked a much older woman who he met on his way home from
the pub. She pleaded with him to let her alone, and he replied, “I’m the boss now.
You have to do what I say.” He apparently sobbed in the dock as he was sentenced
for rape and GBH. He was a previously ordinary young man with a long-term
girlfriend expecting their child, who he will probably never know. We have no
details about his insight or what he felt about his victim, but my point here is only
that he was ordinary in terms of having a capacity for making relationships and

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working, quite unlike the offenders who get admitted to places like Broadmoor,
who really have relationships with anyone. This man’s offence is an example of how
an evil state of mind need not be enduring, or be a persistent quality of a person,
and may even coexist with a capacity for goodness towards others.

The fourth component of an evil state of mind is setting up one’s own

personal moral rulebook, an assumption of a God-like omnipotence which again
ignores social traditions and denigrates the idea of the common good. Primo Levi
tells a story of his time in Auschwitz when he witnessed a guard brutally hitting a
prisoner for no reason. The prisoner protested, “Why did you do that?” Seeking a
rational social understanding of what had happened, not least so he could avoid it
again in future. But the guard replied, “There is no why here.” Communicating that
both he and the prisoner were now in a world with a completely different and
idiosyncratic moral framework and values.

Levi’s example is naturally connected with the fifth component of an evil

state of mind, namely denigration of victims and their vulnerability, and the
causing of suffering. This denigration is the essence of the cruelty that we fear
most about evil, and rightly so. Evil states of mind need a target, someone to
denigrate and despoil and whose suffering proves to the perpetrator that they are
all powerful and that they cannot be gainsaid. In this state of mind, the perpetrator
sees the victim’s vulnerability as evidence that the victim is disgusting or
dishonourable, which justifies their cruelty and may even enhance their status.
Justified cruelty is often legitimised by pre-existing narratives about victims, both
rigidly held and regularly elaborated. The development of such narratives happens
at the level of the personal and the social, especially long held and re-rehearsed
stories of past humiliation and dishonour which must be rebalanced. National and
international experts on violence have commented on the danger to societies
when such revenge narratives are woven into gender role expectations of what it
is to be a man.

The sixth component also involves the creation of narratives, but ones that
dehumanise victims and make them seem non-human. But this process is not as
simple nor binary as it sounds. It used to be thought that dehumanising people was
essential to cruelty because it allowed the perpetrator some moral numbing or
distance from being judged negatively.

But it is clear from studies of everyday atrocities that people in an evil state
of mind may seek to preserve the humanity of victims in their minds as part of the
infliction of suffering. I am thinking here of the man who killed his child in front of
his wife to punish her for leaving him. In that moment, he needed her to be human
in order that she fully experience the suffering he planned for her.

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The final component of the evil state of mind involves self-deception and
rejection of the idea that there is something called truth, which, as John Locke put
it, “Is worth the seeking.” All the components of the evil state of mind are
interconnected, but arguably this last component enables the others and
augments them. Disinformation and self-deception are not new, but there are
parallels at the level of both the political and the individual. Two different
scenarios come to mind here, both of which I know only by report. Many years ago,
a businessman was jailed for fraud, which on the face of it is a non-violent crime
and perhaps not obviously evidence of an evil state of mind. His crime was to make
and sell items which he claimed were landmine detectors, although he knew they
were nothing of the sort. It is not known how many people died because of his idea
of a successful business, and he seems not to have cared to know.

More recently, we have all heard reports of people who use their social
media accounts to spread false information about alleged perpetrators of heinous
crimes. Again, on the face of it, this does not fit with commonplace notions of evil,
and I suspect that these people have nothing in common with those people I see
in prisons or secure psychiatric care. Yet naming a person or persons as a possible
killer of children or animals without any evidence is an act of cruelty. If only
because it shows an absence of concern about what might happen because of that
naming, or even a wish they should be harmed. We cannot know for sure, but I
suspect those who did this told themselves that they were good people doing a
good thing, and either blinded themselves to the consequences or they felt
entitled to harm others they did not like, which is grandiosity, and so did not care.

Such people, who lack care or concern for others they don’t know, probably
pose no immediate danger to citizens they do know; but could that change? Would
you like such a person to care for your children? Or to be your doctor? This was a
question raised in the 1940s by a psychiatrist called Hervey Cleckley, who came
across patients in his hospital who did not seem to care about the distress they
caused others and were similarly grandiose when challenged. Cleckley said this
state of mind was an example of psychopathy, and he called it a kind of agnosia or
inability to see others as people. Cleckley was puzzled by the fact that many of his
psychopaths had what he called a mask of sanity, they appeared generally to be
ordinary, even privileged folk, who yet continued to lie, con and exploit others. It
is important to note that Cleckley’s work did not identify psychopaths as either evil
or necessarily violent. But Cleckley’s work was later used by Professor Robert Hare
to create a checklist of psychopathy, which he applied to men serving time in
prison for violent offences. Hare hoped his work would improve risk assessment,
and there is no doubt that his work has been extremely influential. But I think what
is most noteworthy is that not all the violence perpetrators satisfied Professor
Hare’s criteria for psychopathy, which means that psychopathy doesn’t explain all
violence, or even all wrongdoing.

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So far, I’ve argued that evil states of mind differ from the states of mind we
see in those people with mental illnesses who are violent, and I have also argued
that ordinary men and women can get into those states of mind. So, the question
is, what can drive people into such states of mind? One approach, from the
perspective of individual emotions, was first described in preclassical thought but
is probably better known in its Christian elaboration as the seven deadly sins. Pride
is arguably the deadliest sin, as it is an emotion which leads naturally to grandiosity
and denigration of others. Both gluttony and lust describe dysregulated emotions
as well as appetites. Greed and envy are emotions that link directly to public
discourses about whether there is enough to go round, and the extremes of
inequality that can be a driver of violence. Sloth is probably better understood as
a kind of ultimate in not caring, and a withdrawal from the world, and it may be a
driver for despair which is a risk factor for suicide and potentially for homicide also.

Anger is a complex emotion, not least because it can be both healthy if

properly managed, and also pathological. Anger is also a response to pain and
threat. Pets bite or hiss if they are in pain, and many theorists have argued that the
anger that causes violence is a reaction to fear. But anger is also a potent risk
factor for violence because it can take a pathological form that leads to hatred,
and that emotion creates destructive bonds between potential perpetrators and
their victims.

We all have to live with and learn from such emotions, which is partly the
basis for my assertion that the capacity for evil is there to be found in all of us. It
is, as St. Thomas Aquinas suggested, “A disposition in humans that may never be
enacted but could be in the right circumstances.” But those right circumstances
may not always be down solely to our individual personalities and beliefs. We are
social animals who are influenced by how others think and feel, and as we have
seen by the stories we hear and listen to media of different sorts affect the way we
think and feel about our place in society, our bonds to others, and who we may
legitimately dislike or even despise. The reason that Nazi Germany is so often cited
in the context of evil is that it is an example of what happens when the majority of
a social community, including those with leadership roles, inhabit an evil state of
mind and legitimise it at a national and cultural level. Such social structures and
beliefs may resonate and work to amplify those aspects of the individual
personality that can be activated to make evil states of mind seem reasonable and
satisfying.

I want to return to my initial argument that the evil state of mind is one
that all of us can get into. Even the most ordinary person can bring themselves to
carry out terrible cruelty while telling themselves that they are doing good. But we
need to think about how evil starts and grows mentally, and where and how it

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seems likely to flourish, and where and how it can be discouraged. For example,
spending time ruminating on greed, lust, anger, envy and pride, whether on your
own or on social media, is the kind of activity which could edge you towards an evil
state of mind. It might seem far away right now, but if other traumatic and stressful
things happen to you, which they can in the happiest of lives, you might find
yourself developing a state of mind where cruelty to others doesn’t seem so bad.
We can then in fact begin to mirror the evil that we denigrate, fear and despise in
others. I like organic rather than mechanical metaphors for the human mind, so let
me suggest that individual and social minds are like gardens that need close
tending, or the boundaries will be lost, and the weeds choke the desired growth to
death.

I want to close by continuing this metaphor in relation to the importance

of the cultivation of goodness in the individual mind and in communities. If evil is
the absence of good, which I can attest to, we need to grow goodness using organic
and dynamic qualities in our lives as humans. Practicing compassionate and
grateful states of mind can lead to the growth of virtues, which act as a protection
against evil states of mind. We have good reason to think that people, like plants,
flourish in rich soil that is full of nutrients and water, and which forms part of a
complex biosystem which involves other plants, insects and birds. Neglect of the
complexity of both individual and social minds alike can lead to the social garden
being overtaken by ideologies that are like knotweed, damaging and hard to root
out.

To grow a capacity for goodness paradoxically involves paying attention to

our most painful and afflictive emotions, like anger, envy, vengefulness, grief and
fear. If we are able to recognise such emotions within ourselves, and then take the
time to look at them and name them for they are, we may be better able to
consider them compassionately and carefully. When we do this, it gives us mental
space to think about these emotions and see them as events in the mind, and not
identities to inhabit. We then have more ways to manage painful emotions without
harming ourselves or others. We can get what mindfulness practitioners call more
skilful.

So, I am concluding that defending against evil states of mind means

developing a capacity to take horrible emotions, like rage and hatred, seriously.
We especially need to recognise in ourselves the kind of anger that leads to a wish
to hurt others, so that we have more agency to protect ourselves. This may be
essential when social minds and movements around us appear to be drifting into a
wilderness is especially important for those who have suffered trauma for whom
anger may be a constant struggle to manage, and it is the connection between
experiencing trauma and later violence that I discuss in my next lecture. Thank you
very much.

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[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]

ANITA ANAND: Gwen, thank you so much. One thing struck me, is you talk
about an evil state of mind. And you’re very careful to say it is not a binary thing,
good and evil, and yet a lot of the imagery you used in your talk is biblical. And I
see such clarity in scripture, and that can be whatever faith you come from, which
says there is such a tangible thing as evil. And you’re a religious person. How do
you reconcile – scripture is often very clear about it, and the fact that you’re saying
there is a multiplicity of avenues that take you there, and therefore can bring you
back.

DR GWEN ADSHEAD: Well, the subject of evil is a huge concept which has
been discussed by saints, such as Thomas Aquinas and what I’ve found helpful is
the understanding that if we think about evil as an adjective rather than a noun
that allows all of us to engage with it, rather than seeing evil as something other
or out there and to decide that everything would be fine if only these evil people
weren’t around.

ANITA ANAND: Let me just ask a question of the audience here: Hands up
if you do think that there is such a thing as irredeemable evil in the world…. I mean,
actually maybe a quarter of the people here. Who here, who put their hand up,
who believed in evil, believes that actually it’s not just evil acts but there are evil
people? Okay… Hands shooting up everywhere. Can we get a microphone to the
lady here…

LINDA MACDONALD: My name’s Linda MacDonald, and in 2017 the

Scottish Prison Service let out an evil killer on home leave who attacked me while
I was walking my dog. His name, I cannot mention obviously, but I was not known
to this person, he was not known to me. And it was really interesting about your
talk because you talked about people who enjoy their evil acts, and even when
you’re begging and you’re pleading and you’re humanising yourself, all the things
I’d done, and yet if it hadn’t been for my screams and being interrupted, I wouldn’t
be here. So, I believe, that day I saw evil. I saw evil.

DR GWEN ADSHEAD: Well, thank you for that incredibly generous

opening up. It was generous of you to share that, and courageous too. And, for
me, it really nicely ties in with what I’ve been trying to say, which is you met
someone in an evil state of mind. And there’s no doubt that he was in that state of
mind, no question that he was in that state of mind. And of course, what is
particularly appalling, not just that you were attacked in this way, but also the fact
that he came out of prison. Which makes me think that nothing that happened in

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prison had done anything to ameliorate that man’s evil state of mind, and his
inhabiting of that state of mind. And it’s really because I think that if we could try
and understand what gets people into those states of mind, we might be able to
do something about it. I’m not arguing that evil state of mind doesn’t exist, far
from it, and I’ve seen that face too, believe me. But it’s about saying if we
understand it as a state of mind that people can get into then we could perhaps do
something about it, rather than simply saying those people over there are evil and
that’s the game over.

ANITA ANAND: Okay. The lady wants to come back. And just on that issue,
if you can get into that state of mind do you believe – and I know this is hugely
personal to you – that the person who attacked you could get out of that state of
mind? Your husband’s shaking his head, but is there a pathway out of that?

LINDA MACDONALD: He had spent 15 years in prison for attacking a

young lady for no reason, brutally stabbed 27 times, slitting her throat, stamping
on her face. Fifteen years of prison to be on home leave, and all that was in his head
in the middle of the day, on a beautiful sunny day, was to kill. No alcohol. No night
out. No drug fuelled..which is interesting, because I do believe that people could
be rehabilitated, but there are the critical few, we have to be mindful that public
safety comes first.

ANITA ANAND: Thank you very much. Let’s take another question from
the gentleman over here.

SIMON MCLEAN: Thank you. My name is Simon McLean). Good evening.

I’m a former police officer. I worked in the serious crime squad and murder squad
in Glasgow and throughout Scotland. I was also a drug squad officer, etcetera,
etcetera. As a young detective, obviously a few years ago now, we were at Police
College and we had a lecture from a criminal psychiatrist, forensic psychiatrist,
from Carstairs who actually irritated us all. We felt that he was able to justify just
about any act of evil, it was neurological miswiring, the chemical processes of the
brain or dysfunctional family history. He seemed to feel that these things
somehow mitigated the criminal, and usually very violent and often evil acts, that
these characters had committed. Do you not accept, Doctor, that in some cases
people are just bad? They continually demonstrate that they’re a danger to us all,
and that no amount of compassion, rehabilitation or opportunities can change that
evil core.

DR GWEN ADSHEAD: I really like your question. But I’m not suggesting
that what people have been through makes them less responsible in any way or
excuses them in any way. In fact, quite the reverse. What I want to do is to try and
understand all the factors that got somebody into a state of mind that allowed

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them to do something horrible. And that we need to understand what that is,
including a wish to harm.

I’m not suggesting for a moment a wish to harm doesn’t exist. In fact, I
actually think the wish to harm others is an emotion that everybody can get into,
and that’s why we need to study it carefully. We actually need to know much more
about who we can help and who we can’t. Because we have some good evidence to
suggest that we can rehabilitate some people, but clearly there are people that we
can’t.

ANITA ANAND: Can we go back to our police officer, who’s sort of reacting
so visibly with his face, but this is radio, so we need to hear what’s going through
your mind as you hear this.

SIMON MCLEAN: Yeah. I didn’t realise I was that transparent. Thank you.

ANITA ANAND: I would play poker with you any day of the week. Go on.

SIMON MCLEAN: I get asked this question all the time. We have a podcast
that we do, a crime podcast, and people ask police officers all the time, why did
someone do that? Murder a child, or whatever the horrific act might be. And we
always say that that why is the question that plagues us all. But as police officers
we never try to delve into what you’re trying to delve into, the why. And the FBI,
who wrote the rulebook on catching serial killers and criminal investigations of
that nature, insist that the main thing that people possess when they commit these
violent crimes is choice. And, that’s as police officers, that’s where we always came
from.

PROFESSOR NIC DAEID: Thank you very much. My name is Niamh Nic
Daeid, and I’m from the University of Dundee. My question is; what is your view on
whether we are evil by nature or whether it’s something that occurs to individuals
because of how they’re brought up, so their nurture if you like?

DR GWEN ADSHEAD: Well, thank you for a very interesting question, and
I’m not copping out when I tell you that I am going to discuss it in my next lecture.
But I will say that I think what we have learnt over the last 50 to 70 years is to put
nature and nurture as alternatives is a meaningless distinction, and nobody
sensible, I think, talks this way anymore. Not least of all because our nature,
whatever that is, is a dynamic one and people don’t arrive on the planet with a
nature; we all have to grow one. And actually, we continue to grow that through
our lives. Our personalities have stable aspects to them that allow us to be
recognised by friends and people that we’ve known, but our personalities can also

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change in certain circumstances, so that people will say of somebody – often after
a trauma – she’s not herself anymore.

So, as social animals we are profoundly sensitised to people’s identities

and how they shift and change. And as for nurture, I want to just say I’ve talked
about nurture in terms of personal growth, but I think we also need to include the
idea of social growth and community growth as well.

ANITA ANAND: Ok we can take another question. There’s a gentleman

over there, on that side, and then I see a former Reith lecturer in our audience, and
we will come to Darren McGarvey in a moment.

JIMMY PAUL: Hello, my name’s Jimmy Paul, and I head up the Violence
Reduction Unit in Scotland. And for nearly two decades we’ve taken a public health
approach to the issue of violence, namely treating violence as a disease and
tackling its root causes. So, my question is this: Whether in a custody suite or
elsewhere, what are the specific things you would like to see more of in addressing
those holistic needs of these people so that we can cultivate that metaphorical
garden you also spoke of?

DR GWEN ADSHEAD: Well, we’re going to need a pretty broad-brush

approach, aren’t we? Because I think we need to be thinking about the
environments that people grow up in, but we also need to think about the
communities in which people live. We need to poverty, housing, opportunities for
work. But I also think we need to think about the things that actually accentuate
evil states of mind. We have very, very good data that says that alcohol and various
kinds of drugs, intoxication can take people closer to that enactment of violence.
So, I’m familiar with the model of a disease model of violence, and I think the only
thing that I think it sometimes leaves out is the kind of individual aspect of choice,
and that sense of actually coming to the moment, and what takes a man or a
woman to doing this terrible thing; and knowing that they’ve done that terrible
thing.

ANITA ANAND: Thank you. Darren McGarvey, our former Reith lecturer…

DARREN MCGARVEY: Hello. Hi. I was just wondering the role that self-
justification plays, because we all, particularly those of us who have any experience
of trauma and who have recovered from that, or addiction perhaps, there are
points where we’re in the grip of that, where we have a very intoxicating narrative
about why we are in the state that we’re in, whose fault it is, and who needs to be
held accountable for that. And I wonder if some of the perpetrators that you have
dealt with are examples of people who have just ran amok with an interpretation

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of what’s actually going on, the justification that they’ve cited to explain their
explosive, shocking act of violence.

And if I can just tack a second thing on this, are forms of violence that you
have seen on a trajectory where almost a tolerance develops? Much like an
addiction, where you seek out a more extreme form in order to just hit your
baseline. I know that’s two questions, I’m sorry, it’s a bit cheeky.

DR GWEN ADSHEAD: You’re absolutely right, self-justification I think is a

very important part of getting into a state of mind where you convince yourself
that it’s reasonable to do what you’re doing. I very rarely come across somebody
who says I set out to do an evil thing. And what they say to themselves is, it doesn’t
matter anymore, or this person doesn’t matter, or I don’t matter anymore, or
nobody will care if I do this. And there’s some kind of self-justificatory narrative
that kind of makes a terrible sense in the moment, it then disappears.

But I think your point about becoming addicted to violence is a very

interesting one, which again deserves much more study. Certainly, in the hospital
where I work the thing that we notice and look for are the people whose pattern
of violence begins to change, where they shift from criminal damage, burglaries,
nicking stuff, to actually then laying hands on people and using weapons, and that
shift is a bad sign. And one of the problems that we have in mental health services
is that mental health services are not always very sensitive to that shift, and, in my
experience, it quite often begins with violence in the family which doesn’t get taken
seriously.
ANITA ANAND: Lots of hands going up. Let’s take one from this side of
the room.

PAM GOSAL: Pam Gosal, member of the Scottish Parliament. I have a big
interest in the subject of evil and violence because I’m looking at a Prevention of
Domestic Abuse Private Members Bill, and one of the areas in there is about
education. So, do you believe, Doctor, that education could prevent people from
becoming evil and violent, whether it’s in domestic abuse situations or any other
situation? And if we were to capture those children at a young age, and it was
mandatory to put any anti-violence courses in the school, do you think that would
help?

DR GWEN ADSHEAD: Well, I certainly think that if schools are not about
emotional education, then I’m not quite sure what they’re for. But the emotional
education has to include learning how to manage horrible emotions and learning
how to manage relational conflict. One of the things that I think is really
problematic is that because we place a lot of emphasis on people being kind and
nice and compassionate, and that’s just as it should be, but what that means is that

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somehow we expect relationships to be like that all the time, and we don’t talk
about the conflicts, the ordinary conflicts that arise in friendships, in relationships
with partners, how you can really hate somebody that you also are very fond of,
and those complexities, and how you manage those emotions skilfully, I think has
got to be part of education. And in terms of childhood, of course children are
changing, so what you tell a nine-year-old, is not what you tell a 13-year-old, and
not what you tell an 18-year-old.

ANITA ANAND: Are we, as a society, just getting angrier and angrier? I
mean, some people call this the “age of rage”?

DR GWEN ADSHEAD: Well, I’m not sure we are an age of rage. I wonder if
every human age is an age of rage. It just gets expressed in different ways. And you
could argue that there’s something about it being more explicit, I think, which is
kind of interesting. But what I think goes with it is the idea of the entitlement. That
I’m allowed to say what I like, it’s my right to say something really offensive. It’s
my right to accuse people falsely of something. It’s my right to put that out on my
Twitter feed. And then when I get criticised for it, I go, oh no, no. Actually no, I
didn’t mean that. No. And you try and wipe it out – so there’s something about not
taking responsibility for the things that you say, and the feelings that you own.

And I think it may be something to do with, again, the idea of being angry
is something that we all experience, so we all have to learn how to manage it. It’s
not just bad people who get rageful. Nice people get rageful too.

ANITA ANAND: Men commit most homicides; does it mean they are more
likely to get rageful?

DR GWEN ADSHEAD: No, I don’t think that’s true at all. I think that women
get rageful, but they express their rage in different ways, and women’s rage can
take the form, of course, of self-harm. Women in prison, for example, the rates of
self-harm in women’s prisons is huge, because of women are struggling with rage
and frustration. But it is in the male estate that we see the highest rate of
completed suicides, so it’s the young men who are killing themselves, and the
women who are hurting themselves. And I think that women’s rage also, I’m afraid,
can be taken out on children. But there’s a lot of different kinds of maternal rage
that doesn’t ever get picked up by anybody.

PROFESSOR LINDSAY THOMSON: Lindsay Thomson, Professor of

Forensic Psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh, and medical director at the
state hospital otherwise known as Carstairs. A comment first on the public health
approach. I think this is really important, this has revolutionised throughout my
professional life. We typically had 110 homicides per year in Scotland, well in

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excess for the population of that seen in England and Wales. Now, due to the
public health approach and the work of the Violence Reduction Unit, it’s down to
50 or 60 per year. So, I think, there’s a very positive message for people to know.

But the question for you, Gwen - you’ve also been talking about two
settings, one is the hospital setting, or forensic mental health settings, where
outcomes are actually very positive, and then there’s the prison settings, where
the resources and the ethos, and there’s much work being done, certainly in
Scotland, in changing this, is not the same as in the mental health setting. So, I just
wonder if you can comment on how you relate your discussion on evil risk
assessment and management, and perhaps what needs to be manifestly changed
in the two settings to help those, particularly in prison?

DR GWEN ADSHEAD: What Lindsay has said is really important, because

you can change things like homicide rates if you bring in the right kind of policies.
You start by taking this seriously and not just saying these people are all evil, let’s
just lock them up and forget about them. It’s only by taking this terrible, terrible
stuff seriously, getting close and looking at it in detail, and thinking about what’s
going on in the mind of a perpetrator, that we’ll be able to answer some of these
terribly difficult questions. And I think it is very important to notice those
successes. And that something is similar, I think, and true, in the prison service in
England and Wales, with the Offenders with Personality Disorder Programme,
which I think has brought about a bit of a sea change in actually thinking about
people who used to be kind of just written off as being just evil; for want of a better
word.

But it is true that the word evil, of course, is not any kind of diagnosis. It’s
a word that’s used in lots of discourses and not in the mental health one, and
rightly so. Yet my patients bring it up. And I think that’s why I’ve continued to be
interested in it, because my patients bring it up all the time. And they talk about it
in group therapy, and they talk about it in individual therapy, and they talk about,
I did a terrible thing; am I an evil person? In fact, they ask the same questions that
we’re talking about; am I an evil bastard? Can I change? Is there really any point
in my thinking about this? Or is it not just better for me to give up? Am I just
horrible? Am I just an evil person?

MICK NORTH: I’m Mick North and I’d like to sort of carry on with the
discussion of the use of the term evil person. In 1996 my five-year-old daughter
was one of the 16 child victims at Dunblane Primary School. The perpetrator was
immediately labelled by the media, particularly the tabloid press, as evil; an evil
monster. Since then, I’ve often been asked did I agree, and I have to say I haven’t.
It was a gut reaction initially, but it feels like a copout that it's a term that’s being
used to explain everything, but it actually explains nothing. To me, he was a

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disgusting man, but I didn’t see him as evil, I saw him as a man with a grudge who
could get a gun. And in some ways that was the more important thing to me, how
could this be prevented? You couldn’t prevent it by somehow sorting out what or
wasn’t evil. You could sort it out by stopping people getting guns.

[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]

MICK NORTH: I’d be quite interested to hear your thoughts on how the
media, and particularly the tabloid press, very easily put the label of evil on anyone
who perpetrates a serious crime.

DR GWEN ADSHEAD: Thank you so, so much for sharing that with us. And
I completely agree with you. That is very much my view, that the sense of, well, he’s
just an evil monster, allows people to kind of close the book and not look closer at
what might have been done in order to try and stop him.

Now, I accept that what he did was a kind of unicorn, cosmic event which
hardly ever happens, and so anticipating those kind of dreadful, diabolical even,
rare events is very hard. But he was a man full of grudge, and a man full of cruelty,
and ruminated on that cruelty and that grudge. And you just kind of wonder what
might have happened if somebody had picked up on the grudge and the grievance,
as well as making sure he didn’t have access to a weapon.

ANITA ANAND: Thank you very much for that.

NADIA EL-NKALA: I am Nadia El-Nakia. I’m a local councilwoman and a

psychotherapist. Maybe circling back to when Anita mentioned religion, that
religion gives a lot of context around the boundaries in terms of goodness and evil,
what is your experience in the use of religion in terms of rehabilitation from the
evil mindset. What’s your experience; is religion being used as a resource or a tool
as part of people’s journey?

DR GWEN ADSHEAD: Well, I’ve been very fortunate to work with

wonderful chaplaincies, both in the hospital where I work at Broadmoor, but also
in the prisons that I visited. I go to a women’s prison once a month and we have a
wonderful chaplaincy there. I think the chaplaincy is a really important part of
offender rehabilitation, precisely because of the delicacy of the issue that you
raise. Precisely because it can be a way of copping out, again, of saying it’s all over
for me; I’m in hell. Which of course, many people are in hell after they’ve done
something terrible. But not a future hell, or a theological hell, but the hell of now.
To have been something who did something terrible is a kind of hell. And I don’t
say that in order to invite compassion necessarily, but to invite thinking about
what’s going on for those people. But also, for other people who are, for example,

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living with long sentences. Their faith, from whatever faith background they come
from, can sometimes be a very important part of how they cope with that, and a
very important part of their rehabilitation. And we should be proud of our
chaplaincies in the prison service.

ANITA ANAND: Do we have a prison chaplain here? [Link] is your

experience? When people come to you, is religion the thing that causes them fear?
Or is it the thing that gives them comfort?

ANNE STUART: Thank you. Anne Stuart. I’ve been a prison chaplain for 17
years, and I don’t know that I’ve really ever come across somebody who found that
propositions from faith were bringing them fear specifically; comfort more. So, we
do need to be wary that somebody who has had a religious conversion doesn’t
assign all their criminal behaviour to their old self, and that they continue to
engage with programs and addressing their offending. But absolutely, huge
comfort, and a moral framework that they perhaps didn’t have before, particularly
if they had a bad start in life.

ANITA ANAND: Do you ever have the question that Gwen faces a lot,
which is somebody saying, am I evil?

ANNE STUART: I’ve had some people saying I am evil, not am I evil, but I
am evil.

ANITA ANAND: And what do you say? Just if somebody comes to you and
says, look, I am evil.

ANNE STUART: My point of view is, at one level, very simplistic, but I think
absolutely true – and I think Gwen, hopefully, may agree with it – but I think it’s as
simple as, from a theological point of view, every last one of us is capable of great
good. The Christian way of looking at it is we’re made in God’s image equally;
everybody is capable of evil. The Christian way of looking at it is we’re all sinners,
so every last one of us is a mixture of good and bad. And I would never agree with
somebody that they were evil, full stop, that that was all there was to them;
because we’re all a mixture of good and bad.

ANITA ANAND: Thank you. Gwen, thank you so much. We’re going to
have to leave the questions there. Next time we’re going to be at Grendon Prison
in England, the first time we have recorded a Reith lecture from inside a prison.
And Gwen, there, will be assessing the possible links between some violence in
some offenders and childhood trauma. But for now, a huge thank you to our hosts
and our audience here at Dundee’s V&A, and of course to our Reith lecturer 2024,
Dr Gwen Adshead.

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[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]

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