Upper School Students heard from Pace parent and forensic psychiatrist Dr. Shawn Ahgarkar earlier in the year, and many students wanted to learn more about his profession. The newspaper followed up with him to answer some student questions.
KN: Hi, how are you?
SA: I’m good, thank you.
KN: Great! Thank you so much for your time!
KN: Okay, let’s get started! What attracted you to your niche specialty?
SA: I was really interested in advocating for people with severe mental illness and a lot of what we do in psychiatry overlaps with the law. There’s a lot of overlap with the law because we have to civilly commit people. Like if we think they’re dangerous to themselves or others, then we have to send them to the hospital against their will. Only us and the police can do that, right? Because we’re depriving people of their civil liberties, because we say, you know, we were so concerned we think you’re so dangerous. Then, it comes up around consent issues. Like if you forcibly medicate somebody because they’re at acute risk of killing somebody else. So there are things that we just have to learn in our field, and those were things that I found interesting and so I decided to do specialized training in those areas. What drew me to it particularly was being able to explain what severe mental illness looks like to judges and to juries so that they can understand what’s going on in a person’s mind and how it led to the behavior that got them in trouble.
KN: People will always see their side of things and see your job from their own perspective, so what are some things that you think people should know about your job and about the field from your perspective/the other side?
SA: That what you see on TV is not reality. And, there’s a lot of paperwork. So much. My case file can be 5,000 to 10,000 pages worth to review. And then I have to you know, review videos and other things. So, there’s a lot of reading and writing which can surprise people because they have to produce a report and all that sort of thing. But I think the thing is that on TV, they make it seem like 99% of these cases involve the insanity defense. You know, somebody’s going to try to get out of something… But in reality, it’s less than 1% of cases that actually go forward with an insanity defense. The thing that I would want people to know is it’s not nearly as successful. It’s a lot of work, there’s a lot to have to review… and [it’s] not as simple and straightforward as TV makes it seem.
KN: What do you hope the future holds for the type of work you do?
SA: I hope that we could improve mental health care in prisons and jails so that these guys who really need the help can get it. I hope that we can have a more nuanced understanding, perhaps more empathic understanding. And [I] hope we get better treatment options available. My hope is we can prevent these crimes from ever occurring.
KN: How has the work you’ve done impacted society?
SA: I mean, I think what it’s done is it has shown a light on the complexities of these cases, but it’s not as simple as the guy was angry, you know, got mad and killed his girlfriend. That there’s a lot of factors involved and that there’s more of a story than just the blurbs. So I think that being able to explain the complex nature of medicine, neurology and psychiatry in a way that people can maybe make more informed decisions about how they sentence people with severe mental illness. My hope would be that that’s an impact that hopefully [I have] made.
KN: Anything else you would like to say?
SA: I think you know again, that we can get past this idea of people being evil or bad.. that’s really not the majority of the cases. You can just get very, very ill individuals who never really got a chance… A lot of damage was done in childhood. One of our early cases [was] with a guy that smashed his head into a concrete wall and into a brick wall (at a young age). He was never the same after that again. You know, we heard a story like that and it wasn’t his fault that that happened. His mom did that to him. But he’s a murderer now, you know? Like, it affected [his] trajectory in school. And he just, you know, kind of just continued to get worse over time. And we point to those kinds of early abuses and early traumas to try to understand- How do we end up here? That’s something that I see in a lot of my work and that’s difficult to see… I also get a lot of these football players, you know, people who do steroids, that kind of stuff. And that’s what we see… their brains are just mush because they’ve just been abusing, they’ve been getting abused and they’ve been abusing themselves. So it’s just how the damaged brain affects behavior. And we don’t see the outward signs of that, right, because they walk and talk. And they’re fine. But then one day they do something that’s just completely out of character, and then it’s really, really sad. And it can be prevented.
KN: Thank you so much for your time!
SA: Thank you!
