Forensic Psychiatric Contributions to Understanding Financial Crime

Abstract

Forensic psychiatric evaluation and consultation can make significant contributions to understanding, preventing, and responding to financial crimes. Drawing on forensic psychiatric principles and experience, and research and analysis from related fields of inquiry, this chapter explores the individual psychological dimensions of financial crimes in their social context, the group dynamics of corrupt organizations, and the interrelationship between the two. At the individual level, there is a need to distinguish "mad" from "bad," i.e., psychosis from character pathology and crimes committed with deliberation and foreknowledge of their consequences. In this context we explore the limitations of rational choice theory as a foundation for the legal approaches to preventing acts of financial crime, understanding their meaning, responding in accordance with the fundamentals of justice. We also address the limitations of classic actuarial responses to the prevention and postvention acts of financial crime. From a forensic psychiatric perspective the prevention and postvention of acts of financial crime needs to be on a case by case basis. In any given case a forensic psychiatric analysis may make reference to such psychopathology and character traits as manic-depressive illness and narcissistic grandiosity, Freud's notion of "criminals from a sense of guilt," and antisocial personality disorder. The forensic psychiatric evaluation of any act of financial crime needs to ask how it is most likely to be the product of individual or institutional psychopathology, character traits, or states of desire. While we will discuss prevention of financial crime in future work, this chapter concludes via setting forth a psychodynamically informed forensic psychiatric perspective as an aid for sentencing of white-collar crime. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)