A forensic psychiatrist who worked with violent offenders at Broadmoor has revealed how she felt ‘radical empathy’ for her patients, who included killers, stalkers and child sex abusers.
Gwen Adshead, 60, has spent 30 years working in hospitals alongside inmates like Peter Sutcliffe and documents her experience in her book The Devil You Know.
Located in Crowthorne, Berkshire, Broadmoor Hospital has housed dozens of sadistic killers since it opened its doors in 1863, including Yorkshire Ripper Sutcliffe, gangster Ronnie Kray and rapist Robert Napper.
Gwen has now revealed how the main emotions she feels for patients include ‘sorrow and pity’, explaining she would often feel ‘radical therapy’ for the offenders during their sessions.
She told The Guardian: ‘In my training. I learned to ask, “What problem did killing this person solve for you?” Together we would discover that homicide had made sense to them in the moment as a solution to some unbearable emotions such as shame or despair.
‘As I listened, it also began to make sense to me. I could see how their dark tangle of thoughts, of ordinary emotions run riot, culminated in a decision that someone should die.’
Gwen Adshead, 60, has spent 30 years working in hospitals alongside inmates like Peter Sutcliffe and documents her experience in her book The Devil You Know
Gwen has now revealed how the main emotions she feels for patients include ‘sorrow and pity’, explaining she would often feel ‘radical therapy’ for the offenders during their sessions
Gwen revealed that during her first week as a newly qualified forensic psychiatrist at Broadmoor, one inmate caught her attention because he ‘looked like a stock image of Father Christmas’.
A colleague later revealed the individual was Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, and Gwen was left stunned by the fact he was ‘not a monster’ but just a man.
She said the experience began a ‘long journey’ for her in which she learned to ‘get go’ of her assumptions over how ‘evil might look’ and instead opened her mind to others.
The psychiatrist has now revealed she has been able to set aside her own feelings and avoid judgement with patients in order to help them work through their problems.
Gwen revealed that during her first week as a newly qualified forensic psychiatrist at Broadmoor, one inmate caught her attention because he ‘looked like a stock image of Father Christmas’. She later learned it was Peter Sutcliffe
She explained she does not try to ‘walk in the shoes’ of her patients, saying: ‘Instead, I keep them company on their painful road towards greater self-knowledge as we work to get to the meaning of their violence.’
Working with her patients, Gwen said she was able to discover why their homicide or crime made sense to them in the moment as the ‘solution’ to an unbearable emotions.
She revealed while working with patients she can often feel their crime ‘makes sense’, untangling their thoughts to arrive at the decision that a person needed to die.
Meanwhile Gwen also said she felt many perpetrators of crime are also victims.
Peter Sutcliffe, known as the Yorkshire Ripper, who killed 13 women and injured many more in the 1970s, was a patient at Broadmoor
Broadmoor, the UK’s oldest psychiatric hospital that housed some of Britain’s most notorious killers
Broadmoor is the oldest of three high-security psychiatric hospitals in England.
Founded in 1863, the hospital was opened as the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum and first admitted a female patient for infanticide.
It now houses up to 210 men after the female service closed in 2007.
The average length of stay at the hospital is five-and-a-half years however this is skewed by a few men who have stayed for for more than 30 years.
Patients are admitted from prison, court or a medium-secure hospital.
However some have not committed an offence but are considered to pose a high risk to society and need to be housed in a secure environment.
Therapy and vocational activities along with medication and pastoral care is on offer.
Patients are transferred back to the criminal justice system or a lower security environment when they no longer require high-security care.
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Her comments come after several members of staff at Broadmoor revealed what it is really like to work at the high-security psychiatric hospital treating the criminally insane in a documentary which aired in May.
From a patient torturing and killing another inmate to stopping obsessive ‘fans’ visiting high profile murderers with their children, mental health professionals opened up about their harrowing experiences in a Channel 5 show, Broadmoor: Serial Killers & High Security.
Professor Pamela Taylor, who worked as head of medical services at the institution, revealed how women would get solicitors to fight for their right to visit sex offenders with their own children in tow, and sent so many love letters to Sutcliffe that he couldn’t answer them all.
Another staff member who featured on the show was Dr Jackie Craissati MBE, who admitted reading about the crimes committed by the patients she treated left her ‘overwhelmed’ and feeling ‘waves of fear’.
In the documentary, Broadmoor staff reveal the difficulties of managing hospital life with their patients, such as Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, who murdered 13 women and injured seven more in the 1970s
‘Our job is not to dwell on what they’ve done in the past, it is to rehabilitate them,’ Professor Taylor says.
‘People want contact with high profile patients, so I think it’s not any secret… that Peter Sutcliffe had a very big post bag.
‘It is claimed in the documentary that Sutcliffe received so many love letters from women that he didn’t have the time to respond to all of them.
Not only that, but the serial killer, who died in November last year, also received three to four visits a week from young women – a different one every time.
True crime author Wensley Clarkson saw some of the letter penned by Sutcliffe while at Broadmoor.
‘If I didn’t know who the author of those letters were, I’d think they were written by someone quite young, in their 20s or 30s,’ he says.
‘Someone who is very awkward with women who thought he could arouse them with writing these frothy 1950s, 1960s expressions like “supa-duppa” and “absolute bliss” and “how wonderful”.
Dr Jackie Craissati MBE, who treated Broadmoor’s patients, has previously spoken of how reading about their gruesome crimes left her scarred for her life and ‘overwhelmed’
‘And there’s the way Sutcliffe signs off literally at the end of the letter. Not only are there lots of “xs” and he signs it “Pete,” he also writes “It’s brill!”.
‘It’s very creepy actually, it’s as if he’s trying to prove something, and he’s trying to show how nice and gentle he is, when we know he’s a monster.
‘This is the Yorkshire Ripper who brutally killed women without bothering to find out their names.’
Dr Jackie Craissati, who offered therapy to Broadmoor patients, admits she can’t claim that treatment is always effective and that everybody is able to be successfully rehabilitated.
Professor Pamela Taylor, who worked as head of medical services at Broadmoor, said how staff are faced with warding off serial killer fans who want to visit with their children, and tried to rehabilitate the country’s most notorious madmen
‘People do need sometimes a long time to come to terms with what they’ve done to begin to be able to reflect,’ she says.
‘Not everyone will get out, but there is capacity for change and rehabilitation.’
However, Dr Craissati admits she herself had felt ‘overwhelmed’ by the sheer horror of the crimes committed by some of Broadmoor’s patients.
‘We’re very careful and very sensible about how we meet with people, where we sit, who knows where we are,’ she says.
‘But having some insight into what it might have been like for the victim, it might overwhelm and you might experience a wave of fear that belongs more to the victim than the reality of the place I’m in.’ .
Source: | This article originally belongs to Dailymail.co.uk
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