Fictional crime shows featuring forensic psychologists, like Criminal Minds, Cracker and Wire In The Blood, have become pop culture staples. But trampling over crime scenes and divining the identity of a hitherto unknown killer from little more than a few cryptic clues and a feeling in your water is a far cry from the truth of the job. I wrote The Dark Side Of The Mind because I wanted to peel back the layers of myth and mystique surrounding what it means to be a forensic psychologist, and to give readers a warts-and-all glimpse into my day to day work, in all it’s frustrating, conflicting and just occasionally, life-affirming reality.
I am firmly of the mindset that forensic psychology is more fascinating, challenging and far-reaching than even the Hollywood depictions would let on. I’ve spent nearly quarter of a century working with those who society would prefer to be out of sight and out of mind, in the institutions that we take for granted but tend to know very little about; our prisons, our courtrooms and hospitals etc. These have included perpetrators of some of the most horrifying crimes; murderers, sex offenders and stalkers. But also traumatised and vulnerable people who have undergone horrors that we can only begin to understand.
The stories that I decided to include in the book are the ones unlikely to hit newspaper headlines. Of course, there is mention of serial killers I have known and enough for the gore-inclined to dine upon, but I wanted to tell the stories that would otherwise remain hidden. Some are heartbreaking, some enraging, some are just plain weird; what connects them is my personal sense of having been deeply affected by them. That, and the insight they give us into the extremes of our shared human condition.
The book chapters chart my development as a psychologist, and I hope they also challenge the reader to confront their own beliefs about offenders and victims. When I first arrived on the dingy corridors of Wakefield Prison, aged twenty-one, my mindset was more rigid. I was armed with just my university degree, my big book of disorders and my preconceived notion of what it was to be either ‘mad’ or ‘bad’. As I progressed through my career and was assigned new patients the first question running through my overworked brain was ‘what is wrong with them?’ I realise now that I satisfied myself with too lazy psychological explanations – they committed this crime because they were psychopathic, schizophrenic etc etc.
Delving into the psyches of convicted men and women has certainly made me question everything I thought I knew, but I wouldn’t change a thing. The overwhelmingly enthusiastic response that I have had to the book so far has been heartening. Even the society’s least endearing member of has a tale to tell, we may or may not empathise with them, but we can always learn from them.
The Dark Side of the Mind: True Stories from My Life as a Forensic Psychologist by Kerry Daynes, published by Endeavor, Paperback rrp £7.99 also available as e-book and in audio.
