Eschewing easy answers in favour of a richly nuanced and sometimes disturbing analysis, forensic psychiatrist Dr Gwen Adshead delivers an immersive deep dive into the minds of violent criminals in the utterly fascinating The Devil You Know. In this piece, Gwen provides an insightful reading list of books that she has found invaluable throughout her career.
In The Bookbag*, Somerset Maugham is characteristically waspish about book readers:
‘Some read for pleasure, which is innocent; and some for instruction, which is praiseworthy; but not a few read from habit which I suppose is neither innocent nor praiseworthy’.
This, I must confess, rings guiltily true for me. I read for instruction and pleasure, but I also know that reading for me is a habit that shades into addiction. I read book reviews with an insatiate eye; I must always have a book with me, preferably more than one. In my house, reading is given primacy over other activities (certainly over tedious processes such as housework, child feeding and personal grooming). I like to hang around with other addicts, seeing what they’ve got and what I haven’t; I have to be forcibly dragged away from charity shops. And of course, there is the ‘taking care of my gear’ when I am to be separated from my usual supply – the loading of the Kindle and the selection of back up paper books in case (the horror, the horror) the electricity fails or the charger is lost.
Selecting books to recommend is therefore almost impossible, so I have decided to describe the books I most frequently recommend or give away, some of more academic origin but all accessible for general readers. The common denominator in this list and in my own writing is an overriding interest in the power of individual human stories.
I suspect that all voracious book readers are likely to be drawn to psychology and the study of the mind. Everyone we meet is a story-in-waiting, if you think about it: a complex narrative that can be explored and developed.
I came across this book just as I was moving into working in the field of traumatic stress, meeting military personnel who had been exposed to a variety of traumas on and off the battlefield. Barker offers a sensitive and compelling fictionalised account of war poet Siegfried Sassoon’s admission to Craiglockhart hospital in 1917, and his meeting there with W. H. Rivers, anthropologist, psychiatrist and (later) politician. We are drawn into his world and the professional clashes of temperament and techniques that still characterise psychiatry as a profession today. Rivers is a quietly heroic figure, who tries to see his patients’ predicaments from their perspective – this is in contrast to the work of his colleague Dr Yelland who treats traumatic mutism in a soldier by applying electrodes to the tongue and turning up the pain until the man is forced to make a sound. We readers, ourselves the mute observers of this instance of brutality, are made painfully aware that this perhaps may not be the last time psychiatrists do harm to those they have power over in the name of clinical benefit. Powerful and moving, this is one of those stories that lives in the mind long after you set the book aside.
Pregnancy and parenthood are experiences that are indescribable to those who have not experienced them. For people who are used to being in charge of their lives, a transition is about to occur which will disorganise the most secure of minds. The charming books that tell you what to expect when you are expecting do not tell you that being the parent of a newborn or a toddler is like having a gorgeous but unpredictable celebrity arrive to stay for the foreseeable future. They will take up all your time and attention and may generate a maelstrom of conflicting emotions and behaviours in everyone who lives in or visits the house, including grandparents, postmen and the cat.
Purves offers a new and gentle alternative to the commonly held story that parents must be perfect or risk future disaster. She suggests that we can all lighten up, cut ourselves some slack. Does it really matter what the baby wears so long as it is warm and dry? Why shouldn’t the baby play with household objects if they are safe and more interesting than the conventional ‘toys’ on offer? Why not organise a child’s routine to coincide with yours, if possible, especially if this means that you will be less irritable and more up for reading Where the Wild Things Are at least five times before bed? Purves invites us to be kind to ourselves and to accept that things will go wrong and be messy from time to time. It is how we deal with the messiness and mistakes that makes us good enough carers, and this is just as true for working in the medical profession as it is for parenting. I was given this book when I was pregnant, and I wish that Purves would write an updated version of her book for twenty-first-century parents complete with advice about tweeting baby pictures and the like. But even as is, it is a godsend for any nervous new parent.
If you are a psychiatrist who is interested in ‘cruel and unusual’ states of mind, as I am, then the mind of a person who oversaw the murders of nearly a million people must be of some interest. How could anyone do such a thing? What narrative do they spin to justify their actions? My sense is that many outside the profession share my curiosity.
In this biography, Sereny takes us into her encounters with Franz Stangl, the commandant at Treblinka, a Nazi extermination camp. Nazi extermination programmes began with what they called ‘mercy killing’ of psychiatric patients before escalating to mass murder. After the war, Stangl escaped to South America and led a blameless and ordinary life for decades until he was captured by Israeli intelligence and brought back for trial. Sereny then interviewed him over several weeks and found him apparently unconcerned about his past ‘work’. Only in their last meeting did he express some distress and regret, before he died three days later.
The real power of this book is that we bear witness alongside the author to an astonishing transformation while someone is telling their version of their life. At first, Stangl appears to have been able to leave his murderous identity behind him and compartmentalise, making an acceptable ‘cover story’ for himself and others. But as they talk, his cover story breaks down and a new narrative of identity emerges in which Stangl is finally able to own his past cruelty and take responsibility. Sereny comments that at the last, her subject ‘became the man he should have been’. She speculates that he experienced horror and shame that he could not have let himself feel before, which then overwhelmed him and made it impossible to go on living.
This is probably best known as the inspiration for Professor Robert Hare’s work on psychopathy, which has generated a vast literature, ranging from formal studies to Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test, to the television series Killing Eve. This is a book of case histories of men and women. Immediately interesting to me is the absence of violence and ‘evil’; rather, what Cleckley describes is a massive lack of attachment, social engagement and empathy. There is a ‘banality’ about his subjects – an idea later reflected in Hannah Arendt’s work – which is baffling to those who meet them. Cleckley was pessimistic about their treatment and it is still a challenge today to know how we should respond to those who seem so ‘normal’ and yet lack that which makes us human. The Mask of Sanity is also well worth reading for Cleckley’s writing style: he has a Maugham-like waspishness of his own, and his description of a psychopathic psychiatrist is a novella of viciousness.
I came late in my career to the vast literature on mindfulness, the practice of non-judgmental attention to the present moment. Mindfulness practice was first described four hundred years ago in those works attributed to a man called Gautama (more commonly known as the Buddha). Over the last few decades, there has been renewed interest in these practices in which the mind is observed as a series of events. Williams et al provide a general account of the cognitive theory of depression and a user-friendly plan for regular mindfulness practice. The accompanying MP3 download has practices led by Zinn, who is an international expert and a guide with a very pleasant voice.
Do mindfulness practices help with depression? National guidelines recommend mindfulness based cognitive therapy (MBCT) for anyone who has had three or more episodes – I was one of those people and I haven’t had to take antidepressants for ten years now. I don’t suggest that we all become Buddhists (although that might not be the worst thing in the world), but I do think that MBCT offers something useful and complementary to other interventions, which may be especially helpful for anyone who takes care of others and is inclined to overlook their own needs.
My last book is much more than a spy story, although that is its genre. It begins with a suspicion that the British Secret Service has a double agent, and the appointment of an ex-member of the service to investigate, George Smiley, who is not a conventional hero in any sense. He has no gadgets, amphibious cars or watches that fire rockets; there are no chases or explosions. He uses evidence, memories and reflections on relationships to expose the truth.
I have lost count of how often I have read this book. I like the uncomplicated prose style and I love its observations of human foibles and personalities. In tiny details or almost throw-away comments about his characters, le Carré creates real people who we care about and make us reflect on our own choices. Above all, this is a book about love, and how it survives disappointment and betrayal, battered but persistent.
*In Collected Short Stories, Volume 4 by Somerset Maugham. 
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