Emeritus Professor Jill Peay has recently published two new pieces of work. In ‘Mental illness and criminal law: Irreconcilable bedfellows?’ in the Routledge Handbook of Mental Health Law, she observes the difficulties of reconciling the criminal law’s need for certainty in attributing legal responsibility, with psychiatry’s ambiguities and nuances. The latter are most evident in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness, but can also pose challenges to the criminal law where offenders may have a psychiatric history. The question mark in the chapter’s title refers to a discernible trend in the criminal law towards greater subjectivity, arguably matching better with the approach to understanding rooted in psychiatry. However, there is no pretence that this relationship continues awkwardly on both sides of the certainty-uncertainty divide.
The second publication, ‘Mental health, mental disabilities, and crime’, is in the 7th Edition of The Oxford Handbook of Criminology. This chapter is co-authored with Dr Ailbhe O’Loughlin, a Senior Lecturer in Law at York Law School at the University of York. Together they unpack, in a criminological context, the complex interactions between mental disability and crime. And consider to what extent offenders with disabilities are primarily isolated perpetrators of crime, or whether those with mental disabilities feature across the criminal justice spectrum as both offenders and victims.