Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines how clinical and legal professionals understand, interpret and mobilise guilt and shame during legal proceedings for mentally unwell offenders. Drawing on interviews, I describe the ethical labour of the doctors and lawyers who read and write medicolegal reports.

Paper Abstract:

This paper examines how clinical and legal professionals understand, interpret and mobilise guilt and shame during legal proceedings for mentally unwell offenders. An initial hypothesis was that highly educated professionals are simply policing people from more deprived backgrounds, using a moral language of care in which guilt and shame play a key role, the function of which is to individualise responsibility for social deviance. However, my research – based on interviews with the professionals that write and make use of medicolegal reports - nuances this picture, illuminating the ethical labour that bridges the gaping inequality between doctors and lawyers on one side, and prisoners or patients on the other.

Feelings of guilt and shame play an important role in the assessment of mentally unwell offenders. Clinicians consider these emotions while forming clinical judgements regarding diagnosis, personality, and risk. Clinicians then make decisions based on these assessments, not just for treatment plans but also for medicolegal reports that influence court processes.

Sociologists and philosophers have drawn links not just with trauma, adverse childhood experiences and offences, but also with class, gender and ethnicity. Shame has been described as a key technology of responsibilisation, contributing to the production and maintenance of socioeconomic inequality. Recent anthropological studies have enriched the study of responsibility, demonstrating the overlapping, multidirectional push and pull of competing responsibilities. This paper advances the literature on responsibility and responsibilisation by investigating how and why particular emotions are pathologised, and who benefits or loses out from such pathologisation.