Project summary
The key legal doctrine of criminal insanity concerns the lack of capacity for responsible action and provides an exemption from criminal responsibility in most countries. Its application depends today on the teachings of psychiatry and on diagnostic categorisations. Psychosis is central to the western idea of criminal incapacity, but its legal relevance is unclear and contested. Rules and judgements rely on underdeveloped and invalid assumptions of mental disorders. This produces unequal treatment, stigma and defies the rule of law. Legal research has not yet provided a proper clarification. It is urgent that legal research carries out empirical studies, revisits current insanity models, and utilises insights by other disciplines, philosophy and mental health research in particular.
Through a novel multidimensional approach, DIMENSIONS fuses philosophy, legal research, and mental health research, and sets out to explore the medical model used in Norwegian law to create new knowledge and understanding of criminal insanity and psychosis. Norway is rare in the world to use a medical model that identifies insanity exclusively with mental disorder, and essentially with psychosis. This model has not been sufficiently explored and may provide paradigm shifting insights of the premises involved in the insanity doctrine.
DIMENSIONS will combine a comprehensive philosophical analysis of the medical model with the first multilayered empirical study of legal argumentation about insanity and psychosis and is pioneering in using recent dimensional and transdiagnostic mental health insights to advance the legal understanding of psychosis. DIMENSIONS has a solid interdisciplinary research team, and is supported by a dedicated advisory committee of world leading scholars to ensure high academic quality and impact. Ultimately DIMENSIONS targets a unified insanity model that is valid across the involved disciplines and that opens new research paths beyond current insanity models.
Work packages
The philosophical dimensions
The philsophical studies explore the foundations, possible justifications, and content of the insanity doctrine.
The positive legal dimensions
The positive legal studies explores how insanity and psychosis are conceptualised in argumentation in legal sources.
The medical dimensions
The medical studies explores the law’s understanding of psychosis.
Multidimensional analysis
Through mulitdimensional analysis, insights provided by the different studies are here brought together to analyse their relations and to explore the potential and content of a unified insanity doctrine.