Making sense of "senseless actions" in relation to criminal insanity.

Abstract

In the assessment of criminal insanity, delusions play a particularly important role, because they express reality judgments, which, due to their verbalized form, serve well as "evidence" of psychosis. However, psychosis, understood as a fundamentally impaired sense of reality, can also involve disturbances that are neither verbalized nor inferential, but mainly enacted. In this paper, we revisit the psychopathological concept of "senseless actions", employed by the German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad to describe the unintelligible actions observed in individuals in the early phase of schizophrenia. The forensic relevance of this concept is illustrated with a historical case study from the annals of Karl Wilmanns. We discuss how "senseless actions" express a global disturbance in the individual's way of finding relevance, meaning, and constraint in the world, and argue that "senseless actions" may function as a behavioral indicator of the transition between a prodromal phase and manifest psychosis - pointing again to its forensic relevance. We stress the importance of considering contextual information and adopt a Gestalt view of how the actions inscribe themselves in the biography of the individual when determining whether "senseless actions" are indicative of psychosis. In conclusion, we suggest that the concept of "senseless action", though imperfect and context sensitive, may offer a framework for identifying disturbances in reality understanding that risk being marginalized in contemporary approaches to criminal insanity.