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Masquerading in Uniform: A Wartime Form of Psychopathic Behaviour

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2018

Harry Stalker*
Affiliation:
Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disorders; University of Edinburgh

Extract

Those who read the Police Court reports in the newspapers—and every psychiatrist should!—will have read, since the war, of persons guilty of unlawfully wearing military uniform or medals. Often the crime appears to be due, not to ordinary motives of gain, but to motives of personal prestige. Seven cases of this disorder of behaviour have been observed at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disorders, and in these cases at least the problem has been one of gravely disordered personalities. It seems worth while reporting the cases, as so far little psychiatric interest has been taken in them. Petrie (1942) and Rossiter Lewis (1942) have each referred briefly to one case. Three of the cases were included in the figures in a previous paper on psychiatric states in ex-service patients (Stalker, 1944), but in one of these the masquerading was not known at the time. Their case-records were not reported in that paper.

Type
Part I.—Original Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1945 

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References

Henderson, D. K. (1939), Psychopathic States. Chapman & Hall.Google Scholar
Petrie, A. A. W. (1942), J. Ment. Sci., 88, 493.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rossiter Lewis, A. P. (1942), ibid., 88, 498.Google Scholar
Stalker, H. (1944), ibid., 90, 727.Google Scholar
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