Word: psychiatrist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
During 23 hours of interviews with Patty, the psychiatrist said, he became convinced that she was telling the truth. West was one of the four experts appointed by Judge Carter in September to determine if Patty was stable enough to go into court. In a 135-page document that he wrote with Margaret Singer, a Berkeley psychologist, West raised doubts that Patty was then competent to stand trial. He also concluded that she was so thoroughly influenced by her captors that she had no choice but to go along on the bank robbery. Backing up Bailey's claims, West...
...psychiatrist drew a close analogy between Patty's experience and that of the Air Force officers he had examined. Not only did she live in constant fear, but she was isolated for long stretches and harangued with polemics. Her personality, said West, "became acutely regressed," and she "developed a childlike dependency upon her captors...
...which Patty helped the Harrises escape by firing weapons over their heads? West explained it away by saying that she performed exactly as she had been conditioned to do. He made much of Patty's first remark to the Harrises: "Did I do it right?" Patty, said the psychiatrist, was seeking their approval as though she were "a child...
West said that Patty's IQ had dropped to 109 from a score of 129-130 on school tests, which had placed her, the psychiatrist said, in the top 5% of the nation in intelligence. Standard psychological tests revealed a person with a "childlike level of functioning," one with a "lack of self-esteem and shattered pride." The stories she made up were "sad, hopeless, with nostalgia about the past." Describing human characters in one test, she tended to use such words as "dutiful and compliant"-a common response, West told the jurors, among former prisoners...
Prosecutor Bancroft, 38, a husky, tenacious man, tried the psychiatrist's temper during cross-examination but failed to shake his testimony or to attack his credentials successfully. Oddly, the prosecution did not bring up one bizarre episode in West's career: killing an elephant with an overdose of LSD. West was trying to find out why elephants have periods of madness. Bancroft also tried to no avail to show that West was habitually soft on defendants. West did add one interesting point: after Jack Ruby was convicted for killing Lee Harvey Oswald, the psychiatrist was called...