Anyone watch the Louis Theroux mental asylum second parter? Quite good viewing.

It occurred to me, is it not strange how quick people are to brand certain criminals "evil", and others not? For example, I’ve not yet seen anyone refer to old Germanwings chappie in such terms, despite him murdering 149 people.

ask Collymore imo hes the expert

we'll be able to make a judgement.

I was thinking about the 'evil' thing, the other day and marvelling at the human capacity for self-justification and exculpation. I was trying to put myself in the mind of a child molester.

Now most of those guys aren't 'evil' or even psychophathic, I would guess. Indeed, I would guess that most of them are conscious of the wrongness of what they do, but I'd also guess they have elaborate psychological self-defence mechanisms that prevent them acknowledging how awful what they do is. Otherwise, they simply couldn't do it. Or at least they couldn't live with themselves afterwards.

So my question was this: at what point does that sort of self-exculpatory thought process become delusional? At what point does it spill over into mental illness? And can someone that delusional be 'evil'?

very septic

Of course, what also blurs the lines is that, much like in conventional prisons, once incarcerated in a mental asylum, it is heavily in your interests to display remorse, whether or not you feel it.

And in the case of those who wish to remain incarcerated, it is in their interests to convince others that they re mentally ill (or 'malingering', as it is known)