Dr. James Hamilton
Appearances
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
laid bare in these diaries, the selfishness of it all. This is not about CH. This is about Ms. Hartman. In this case, in a lot of the documents that I've read, the mom seems to have this sense of entitlement. Like, they have to treat me. They have to care for me. They have to do this. They have to do that because that's what I want and that's what my child needs.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
Very unselfconscious about how entitled and selfish she is. And those things in the diary, I don't know that she was as self-aware about the selfishness as she was in other parts where she was self-aware about her neediness. But, of course, they're related.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
The comments she makes about being emotionally abusive to her kids and being cruel to them, I've seen that in other cases as well. I had a case down south when I lived there. The babysitter was available as a collateral informant, and the babysitter commented on how
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
inattentive, unrealistically demanding of like the child when the child was too young to be expected to do this or that or the other thing. The mom was expecting it quick to anger, not warm, you know, not loving. And the contrast between the gushy
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
wonderful mom loving caring mom would do anything for their kid would make you think that when you saw them at home um and they weren't being watched by anybody you'd see the same amount of gushing over the child but um it really you know it it's all a play and um you and i uh recently had the opportunity to speak to some forensic psychiatrists about this and i i sort of
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
previewed my developing view that this is much more like a kind of exploitation abuse than it is an event-related abuse. And I talked about the idea that in this play, in this drama that these perpetrators create, where they are both the director and the main character, the most important character, the child is not really even a character, the child's a prop.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
And so it's consistent with that formulation that at home, The mother's selfish and if it's between her needs and the kid's needs, it's going to be her needs. I'm pretty sure Emma probably just felt ignored by this. She wasn't, she wasn't apparently used as a prop.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
Um, she wasn't getting any of this, uh, attention that's associated with the circumstance that, um, Sophie created for C and, um, and, and that's, you know, that's terribly sad.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
The fact that the topic came up of songs associated with cancer, I thought that was interesting. That was among the search history terms that were in the documents that you shared with me. And... That made me wonder if she was thinking through season two, or maybe it was season three at this point, starting to put together the storyboard for the next chapter.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
I forget the abbreviation for the illness that she claimed that CM had. As that chapter was drawing to a close, what else was she going to do? And the idea that that could include something like cancer, it could also include something like expecting her death or who knows. So yeah, that was a bit chilling.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
And it really sort of speaks to the idea that there might be self-deception involved, but this is often very, very planful.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
That's a good example of this idea that she's storyboarding.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
I think it's all a matter of the specific tastes of the perpetrator, what kind of sympathy they're after. I think you referred to, and I think we're more and more in this conversation, referring to this idea of a narrative. That this kind of abuse, again, is a prolonged abuse. It's a storytelling abuse.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
And this particular feature that you're talking about of the death of the child, in some way, you know, it fixes the story. Like, the story can't have a surprise ending where the kid goes on the Dr. Phil show in five years or ten years and says, I had this mom who did all these terrible things to me. I realized more than she knew, and I knew that I was being medically abused.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
Nothing could have happened to the story if... If the child dies. So there's a sense of narrative control. It's very poignant, as you say. It opens up, you know, I use the analogy of planning for season two or season three. It opens up a whole new season, a whole new sort of chapter of Sophie's story or the perpetrator story, whoever it might be.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
The terrible thing about all of this really is that people who have genuinely ill children and who are genuinely you know, grieving and in need of support and coalescing with others around that experience are harmed by this. Rare disease groups, rare disease advocacy groups, researchers and parents and such are really harmed.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
by when a situation where somebody sort of co-ops this rare disease, perhaps spoiling research data, perhaps, as I said, casting suspicion upon everybody else who says they have it. It's awful. It's the depth of the thoughtlessness and selfishness really expressed, I think, in some of its most depressing ways.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
My name is Jim Hamilton, and I have a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, and I worked for many years as a psychology professor.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
People who've engaged in medical child abuse, some significant percentage of perpetrators have a fairly clear history in their own medical records of exaggeration, fabrication, exploitation of illness to meet their psychological needs. As I looked over the snippets that you gave me to read, I was struck by exactly that thing.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
that she made some sort of comment about having to be needy in order to be needed. This is something we try to get courts to understand when we present cases of medical child abuse. And this is the part that I think is hardest for them to understand and that she articulated it so beautifully.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
I mean, I could just take the quote from the snippet you gave me and read that in court the next time I have to, because it's so exactly what we think is going on in these cases.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
We always talk about once we find evidence that abusive behavior has occurred, we want to think about, all right, we're not so much interested in diagnosing something like factitious disorder imposed on another or malingering by proxy or anything like that. But we do need to sort of articulate what the psychological need is that's being met by this behavior.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
One of the things I thought about as I was reading all this is that I was trying to make sense of the fact that all of that is laid out so clearly in a case of a problem, medical child abuse, where the perpetrators are usually very fastidious about controlling information. keeping the deceptions up, keeping their secrets.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
To commit this to writing, I'm wondering what her thinking was in actually doing that. Did she think no one was ever going to see it? Or did she have maybe a more complex plan in mind?
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
The idea that these folks try to deceive themselves, if that's true, then you wouldn't want to put it in writing. that you sort of have yourself figured out for why you're doing the things that you are denying to others that you're doing, which is making up all of these fabrications and exaggerations about your child's illness. I don't know if you saw this.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
I don't know if anybody but me saw this. But in the snippets that you gave me to read, at some point it said capital D, capital I, capital D. Wow.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
Which is an abbreviation for dissociative identity disorder. And I noted that somebody mentioned that that these things were in different handwritings, the notations that, that she was, she herself made, uh, were in different handwriting, depending on what the topic was, et cetera, two possibilities about that. Maybe she didn't mean anything by writing DID.
Nobody Should Believe Me
S05 Ep07: Who is This Bad Soul?
Uh, that's one, I guess that's three possibilities. Uh, another is that she has something like dissociative identity disorder. And a third is that this is, uh, The reason she's writing all this stuff down in this peculiar way is she's preparing kind of a defense or an explanation for why she's done what she's done.