When a Diagnostic Tool Becomes a Stealth Self-Torture

"I was under a lot of pressure to get the tests done on Williams because the Crown wanted to get on with it. To avoid publicity I did all the work at night starting at around eight o'clock at the Royal Ottawa. The OPP would transport him and I would work with him at night when there was no Joe Public around. So I'd be there till midnight and I had 30 days to do the work.
"Then I had to go to Orillia to see the tapes. And the tapes are awful. They really are.
"Always with these things you know what the end play is. You're seeing someone alive being sexually assaulted and you know they're going to die. It's very, very hard.
"I burst into tears and was crying uncontrollably. I was shaking. I had never had an experience like that and it felt awful. I was crying and saying my life is a failure and asking myself, 'Why did you choose to do this stuff?' I was completely self derogatory and beating myself up. For the five hours back to Brockville I was struggling.
"The Williams tapes brought back the Bernardo tapes. I had this video show going on and on and I couldn't sleep. I would stay up till 2 a.m. to avoid going to sleep and so it was worse the next day."
Dr. John Bradford, psychiatrist, specializing in the criminally insane

Wayne Cuddington / Postmedia NewsDr. John Bradford is a prominent psychiatrist who specializes in dealing with the criminally insane such as Paul Bernardo and Russell Williams. As a result of the stressful subject matter he deals with on a daily basis, he has been diagnosed with PTSD.

Psychopaths like Russell Williams and Paul Bernardo, and his wife Karla Homolka have no conscience, they are incapable of empathy or compassion, they act for themselves and their deranged sexual drive committing themselves to atrocious acts of malevolence against other human beings because they feel entitled to take for themselves whatever they want, that other people are there to satisfy their needs, and nothing else.

Ordinary people, even those like Dr. Bradford, trained to disassociate himself personally from the intimacy of contact with such dread criminals haven't the questionable gift of genetic endowment that leaves them unmoved at the plight of others, they feel stricken and experience a driving compulsion to help others, not to inflict pain and misery, let alone death on other people. Confronted with the close scrutiny of the acts of psychopaths the normal reaction of a normal person is revulsion and rejection.

Courts of law and the judicial system may be willing to label these conscienceless criminals who feel no remorse for the horrible pain they feel justified to inflict upon others to satisfy their inner demons, but it is far more likely that society would prefer to believe that such horrible acts of violence untrammelled by conscience are the acts of the insane, rather than acts committed by those who are only 'insane' in their belief that they will never be held to account for their unspeakable acts. 

Dr. Bradford, as skilled as he was as a professional medical man, trained to look beyond the perversion of normalcy and to attempt to directly confront the twisted mind capable of planning and carrying out the most repulsive, degrading and destructive activities by one person upon another, in an attempt to understand the depths and the intrinsic cause of that malfunction in human nature, found himself maimed and wounded by this last of his succession of encounters with the criminally 'insane'.

He thought he could manage on his own, with his medical knowledge and practitioner's skills -- after all, he has a renowned reputation as a successful criminal psychiatrist -- to pull himself out of a condition that would later be medically acknowledged as post-traumatic stress disorder. But he was unable to. Seeking treatment from other professionals, he refused their advice to begin taking medication. Until no other choice was available to him.

"I knew there was something wrong but there was a lot of denial on my part. And that's why it didn't work when I first went into treatment. I was pessimistic and depressed, but if you're a psychiatrist and a tough forensic guy you think you can blow anything off, right? And that's what I did." And that's why his life began to degenerate into a living hell of despair and self-rejection. Complete with temper tantrums and a growing drinking habit "to numb things".

"I am a calm, patient guy but I completely changed. I'd fly off the handle at anything. I had rage attacks and would shout and scream over nothing -- over crap -- shouting and swearing. When you have rage attacks it's the people close to you who have the worst time. It really was awful You change as a person and your relationship with your spouse changes. Marriages go down the tubes very quickly with PTSD and once your marriage is gone it compounds it and you feel more depressed. It's very destructive."

Treatment did eventually succeed to a matter of degrees for Dr. Bradford. "I don't talk about the treatment much because it's difficult for me but getting to it early is important", he informed a journalist probing the daunting, little-understood coping details of post-traumatic stress disorder. Dr. Bradford, after what he had experienced, vowed never again to take another case that involved graphic, violent videos.

Eventually, after consulting with the psychologist treating him he agreed to analyze Luka Magnotta, the porn actor who videoed himself murdering and dismembering a young university student, then mailed the severed limbs to schools and politicians. "I was very careful to find out the contents of the video and decided I could probably handle it."

"PTSD is real but it's a matter of degree. There is no question that people are totally handicapped by it but we are all different. We have different personalities and different psychological makeups. It's the persona and makeup that enable people to cope but it's also very easy to become self-destructive with PTSD."

Information taken from article by The Ottawa Citizen journalist Chris Cobb working on a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research