
Dissociative identity disorder is now listed in the DSM (the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), though some psychiatrists have dismissed Lewis’s diagnoses as coaxed impressions of separate personalities out of interviewees.
EVIL INSIDE WIKIPEDIA TRIAL
When Lewis first invoked dissociative identity disorder as an insanity defense in the 1980s, particularly in the widely covered trial of Arthur Shawcross, who terrorized the Rochester, New York, area in the late 1980s (and had a cyst pressing on his temporal lobe, as well as scarring on his frontal lobes probably from both abuse and accidents), Lewis was widely dismissed. Crazy, Not Insane traces a career intent on defining, testing and identifying biological and psychological manifestations of said concept beyond spiritual determinism, and a philosophical evolution from fixation, as a Jewish child in 1940s New York, on the “what made the Nazis tick”, to a long-held conviction against inherent violence.Īlong with longtime collaborator Dr Jonathan Pincus, a neurologist, Lewis, a psychiatrist at Bellevue hospital in New York and professor at Yale University’s Child Study Center, identified three common factors in the most violent offenders: predisposition to mental illness, especially psychosis abnormal brain dysfunction, particularly to the temporal or frontal lobes which govern emotional regulation and impulse control and almost invariably, horrific childhood abuse, often buried beyond the reaches of memory and absorbed by some manifestation of dissociative identity disorder (DID), formerly and most commonly known as multiple personality disorder.
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Or else, maybe you’d say we all are born with a capacity for evil, and you handle it differently.”Įvil, as she pointed out in a contentious 2002 interview with Bill O’Reilly embedded in the film, is a religious concept, not a medical or scientific one. “You get a combination of factors, environmental and intrinsic, that create a very violent person,” Lewis said. “You realize that when you are talking with these people who have done some really extraordinarily violent acts, that there’s an environment that created that,” she told the Guardian. The film couples the evolution of Lewis’s research with her philosophical conclusions from years of examining murderous individuals: first and foremost, a belief against inherent evil.

Lewis, now in her 80s, is petite, sprightly and measured on camera, she pores over old records with an unmitigated curiosity and residual anxiety over potential missed diagnoses from years before in a career credited with upending understandings of criminality in America, and in particular illustrating the confluence of factors – a “recipe for violence”, as she puts it – that make a killer.
