In tonight's "Criminal Minds" the team looks at evil with an overlay of mental illness. At first Ben appears to be a serial killer driven by his delusions. Within him are three voices. Spencer fears the possibility that he may mutate into Ben. Mental illness runs in his own family and he's at the age when the psychotic break with reality could occur.
Then we find out that there might be more going on in Ben then just wiring that gets frayed. He might be evil. He did his first killings through a fire he started long before the age when mental illness takes over. Spencer is not Ben. But that doesn't get him off the hook that he will not wind up like his mother, in custodial care.
There is also the possibility that Ben, like the Boston Reaper, could return to haunt the team. The mental hospital believes that shock treatment has restored him to sanity. The last we see of him his hands are free. Those in the hospital might be lax in watching him. Ben could get out and murder again. After all, those three voices do return.
This episode raises questions if the strength of the Freudian movement and then of the belief in psychiatric drugs lulled our society into framing horrific behavior as a type of mental illness. That might be called the medicalizing of causality we can't explain, at least not yet.
That perspective dominated the trial of Stephen Hayes, convicted of murdering three members of the Petit family here in Connecticut. But the jury didn't buy in. They sentenced him to death, despite every heroic effort from his defense team to do what they must do under the American legal system. They pulled out all stops to portray Hayes as sick.
Now that "Criminal Minds" is going into ambiguous territory in interpreting the behavior of murderers we might see a plot line mirroring that of the Petit killings. The second suspect will be tried in the fall. Will he also be positioned as mentally ill?
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