Geoffrey Boycott and domestic abuse

A footnote on the psychiatric “evidence”

Cricketer Geoffrey Boycott has been in the news recently, following the award of a knighthood in outgoing Prime Minister Theresa May’s honours list. The coverage has not been celebratory, with criticism of the decision focusing on Boycott’s conviction in a French court for beating up his then partner in 1998.

It’s a shabby affair, and I followed it up mainly because I wanted to understand more of the French investigatory (rather than adversarial) approach to testing evidence – described disinterestedly by Boycott as being assumed guilty unless you can prove yourself innocent. In the middle of the contemporaneous coverage of the original verdict in the Independent newspaper I came across this striking paragraph about an aspect of the case I hadn’t previously seen reported: 

The judge, Dominique Haumant-Daumas, indulged Boycott and his lawyer when they presented hours of muddled evidence from, among others, a psychiatrist who had never met the victim, Margaret Moore, 46. (He judged her, from television clips and conversations with a former husband, to be a “hysterical psychopath”.)

The case was dug up again by The Telegraph newspaper in 2015, with the assertion that “Geoffrey Boycott ‘must be knighted’ after new evidence points to his innocence over domestic abuse case.” The paper was more expansive about the nature of the psychiatric evidence:

Dr Peter Wood, a consultant forensic psychiatrist who was consulted by Boycott’s legal team, concluded that Miss Moore: “Has a diagnosable psychiatric disorder in the form of a personality disorder with hysterical and psychopathic features. It is likely that there is an additional factor, namely chronic excessive intake of alcohol, probably alcoholism…there is clear evidence of her lying on a repeated basis. She is probably a pathological liar.”

I have no idea if Theresa May thinks Boycott is innocent – after all it was only a French court in which he was tried – or whether she accepts the verdict but thinks it’s irrelevant to the award of a national honour. I don’t know anything about the psychiatric report(s) seen by the court, beyond what is quoted in the national press. What I do know is that this way of describing somebody’s personality as a mental disorder offers an uncomfortable illustration of one reason why so many people find psychiatric practice objectionable.  The roots of the diagnosis of personality disorder are in pejorative and misogynist labelling and no amount of “destigmatising” can change that. It’s time we dropped the whole idea – neither medicine nor the law would be any the poorer if we did so.