ABSTRACT
The mentally disordered offender is an amalgam of conceptualisations from various sources, including legal, psychiatric, criminal, and social. However, the social construction of the mentally disordered offender requires a central focal point which can galvanise the issues of danger, threat, and harm. The criminal act brings into stark relief certain features pertaining to, both, the mentally disordered person and the society that produces them. Forensic psychiatry, thus, conquered a field of knowledge that was located in the concern with the dangerous offender in the social body. In the post-war era it is, perhaps, the notorious combination of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley that evoke the greatest social disquiet. The chapter explains the mechanism by which the mentally disordered offender is socially constructed in our cultural ideology. It can be said that 'ideology refers to a set of ideas which interpret the world according to the point of view of a particular social group'.
