Psychiatrist or Psychologist?

Why people do things, especially extremely nasty and distressing things, lies at the absolute core of what probation is all about. I think most people would accept that it's only when we fully understand the reasons for certain behaviour that we can begin to help that individual to alter their behaviour and stop reoffending. Indeed this sound principle of trying to understand lies at the centre of our modern criminal justice system and eventually gave rise to the notion of courts routinely requesting Pre Sentence Reports precisely in order to better understand.   

Obviously with experience and training probation officers quickly become adept at this core task, but sometimes the behaviour is so outside 'normal' parameters, it necessitates expert opinion. Unfortunately this is where the problems start, basically because of a widespread failure to understand the difference between psychiatry and psychology. They are very different disciplines, the former concerned with mental health and the latter dealing with abnormalities of thinking. Psychiatrists broadly deal with mental illness, whereas psychologists try to understand what lies behind certain behaviour.

Because every person is unique and thus do not easily fit into 'boxes', so it is with various behaviours. Sometimes it's impossible to decide what expert opinion might be more appropriate in a difficult case, psychiatric or psychological? In an ideal world, in some instances both would be extremely useful, but this is where another problem arises, that of cost. Expert practitioners in both disciplines are very expensive in my experience and thus courts are becoming increasingly loathe to request either, let alone both.

In the recent very sad case of Sarah Louise Catt, having benefited from a psychiatric report that found no evidence of mental illness, we will never know why the sentencing judge 'saw no need to order a psychology report' before handing down a sentence of eight years for what many would regard as a very strange and worrying act. There was much reported from her past to give cause for concern. 

I think in cases like this it is particularly unfortunate because, in my experience at least, it becomes almost impossible to obtain or fund such expert opinion post sentence. Although many prisons have psychology departments, they are mostly staffed by trainees and heavily over-worked generalist supervisors. 

In short, the absence of expert reports at the time of sentence not only robs the sentencing judge of often vital insight into a person's reasoning for committing an act, it also robs future supervising probation officers of the same insight that could greatly assist with the offenders rehabilitation.