Automatic Behavior

Neurology and Psychiatry

A presumed association between epileptic seizures and violence was seminal to the development of case law on automatism. Offenders who commit a crime during an epileptic attack are usually found not criminally responsible. Automatisms are also observed in complex partial epileptic seizures characterized by motionless stare, interruptions of ongoing behaviors, stereotyped non-purposeful movements, and subsequent amnesia.

Dazed, semi-conscious victims of concussions may display automatisms. Other brain conditions also may lead to automatisms because the faster metabolic changes happen, either from normality or back toward normality, the more likely seizure is to occur.

Apart from automatisms observed in schizophrenia or during intoxications, three other conditions are associated with automatism in psychiatry:

• 1.
  Dissociations are coordinated physical acts undertaken while groups of mental processes or ideas are separated from the rest of the personality so that they assume an independent existence; thus, they are dissociated from the normal stream of consciousness. Dissociated acts escape the integrative activity of the mind and are common in hysterical neurosis, multiple personalities, autoscopy (the perception of self in the exterior environment) and in other out-of-body experiences, mystical phenomena, states of possession, voodoo, and experiences of mediums during séances in spiritualism.
• 2.
  Psychological blows are unexpected and sudden emotional shocks, on witnessing catastrophes or on receiving news, that seriously devastate emotional equanimity. A psychological blow defense presumes that any person, even one with intact personality structure and no history of mental problems, could be overcome and dissociate. Based on R. v. Rabey, courts apply an objective test for a psychological blow that measures the gravity and severity of the psychological trauma in a person with no history of mental or personality difficulties; absent this, courts will find for insane automatism, as in R. v. K.
• 3.
  Somnambulism is a state of dissociation in which, when the person sleeps, some fragment of the personality directs him into performing complicated acts, as asserted in R. v. Tolson. As determined in R. v. Parks, somnambulism is a “normal” form of automatism.

Law

Three factors lie at the intersection between medicine and law with regard to automatism as a

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