After receiving verdicts of not guilty by reason of insanity, John McGee and Ronald Manlen were committed to Michigan mental hospitals. The center for forensic psychiatry later determined that McGee and Manlen were “no longer mentally ill and dangerous” and released them. Shortly after being released, McGee kicked his wife to death and Manlen raped two women. The public outcry that followed the...

L ong before there was psychiatry, there was the insanity defense. The idea that the insane should not be punished for otherwise criminal acts began to develop in the twelfth century as part of the more general idea that criminal punishment should be imposed only on persons who were morally blameworthy. In the thirteenth century, Bracton, the first medieval jurist to deal with the subject of in...

When the first asylums opened, around 1800, mania was a generic term for insanity. Philippe Pinel’s Treatise on Insanity that appeared in 1800was accordingly namedTrait e sur la Manie. For 2000 years before Pinel, the chief determinant of diagnosis in medicine lay in the visible presentation of the patient. These visible presentations could lead to reliable diagnoses of tumours, diabetes, catat...

Abstract Richard Giles, a leading Australian Georgist political economist, suggests that criticisms of mainstream economics can be reduced to three: neglect the Physiocrats, rejection economy, and attempted revival land with faulty variants those principles. Yet, in defending Georgism, Giles fails show it resolve legacies chattel slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism. Despite limitation, shows r...

The authors obtained opinions of forensic psychiatry in a community survey following the not guilty by reason of insanity verdict in the Hinckley trial. A majority of respondents expressed little or no confidence in the specific psychiatric testimony in the Hinckley trial and only modest faith in the general ability of psychiatrists to determine legal insanity. Respondents' general and specific...

Author(s): Jones, David. W. Article Title: A Psychosocial Understanding of Personality Disorder: the historical problem of Moral Insanity Year of publication: 2009 Citation: Jones, D. W. (2009) ‘A Psychosocial Understanding of Personality Disorder: the historical problem of Moral Insanity’ In: Day-Sclater, S., Jones, D.W., Price, H., Yates, C. (eds) Emotion: New Psychosocial Perspectives, Palgr...