Psychiatrist Gilles Chamberland, right, testified Wednesday at the trial of Luka Magnotta. Photo: DARIO AYALA/Postmedia News file MONTREAL — Luka Magnotta’s purported diagnosis of schizophrenia took a pounding Wednesday as a forensic psychiatrist testifying for the prosecution took it apart.
Or, as Dr. Gilles Chamberland put it, summarizing his trip through the reams of medical records in evidence at trial, “So, this is how the diagnosis of schizophrenia was built, was constructed, for Mr. Magnotta.”
That diagnosis is at the very heart of Magnotta’s defence.
Magnotta has admitted through his lawyer, Luc Leclair, that on May 25, 2012, he killed and dismembered Chinese student Lin Jun, videoed and posted online a gruesome video of the dismemberment, and then mailed Lin’s hands and feet across the country.
But he is pleading not guilty by dint of his alleged mental illness — the alleged schizophrenia.
Chamberland was never given the chance to interview the 32-year-old Magnotta, who refused to see him.
That precludes him from offering “a very strong opinion” about Magnotta’s illness, he acknowledged from the start, because a face-to-face assessment “is the core of (a psychiatrist’s) opinion.”
But using Magnotta’s health records, Chamberland showed Quebec Superior Court Judge Guy Cournoyer and the jurors just how dubious the foundations of the schizophrenia diagnosis may be.
He did it by showing how quickly and on how little information the original diagnosis was made and, how once made, it immediately came to be seen by other doctors as written in stone.
Magnotta first reported having symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions as a teenager, when he was living with his family — including his schizophrenic father — in the Peterborough, Ont. area.
Even then, two crisis workers who separately saw the then-18-year-old recognized that while Magnotta might be suffering paranoid delusions, they also suspected he might, as one of them wrote, “be putting all this up.”
Chamberland quoted a reviewing psychiatrist, Dr. C.T. M’Cwabeni, who in 2001 made a note about the “bizarre presentation” of Magnotta solely because he believed at some future date, one of his colleagues would encounter the odd young man.
“That’s almost a prophecy,” Chamberland said, “and it was 10 or 12 years ago.”
Despite the professionals’ reservations, if not skepticism, by June of that year, “the diagnosis hardly made,” Magnotta was busy filling out the form to get Ontario Disability Support Plan benefits, rattling off the classic symptoms of schizophrenia. (He added a bad back as another reason he couldn’t possibly work.)
It’s possible, Chamberland said, that Magnotta was experiencing the symptoms or, as his own family suspected and later told other doctors, he’d learned them at his father’s feet and was simply mimicking them.
By August 2001, Magnotta was formally diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic.
By March of the following year, when he was seen at Toronto East General Hospital, the diagnosis changed to chronic schizophrenia — a ridiculous one for a young man, and usually reserved for much older, much sicker patients for whom even major antipsychotics haven’t worked.
“That surprised me,” Chamberland said. “There’s nothing to support that, nothing in the records to justify or support that.”
Thereafter, he said, using various excerpts from the records to illustrate the point, subsequent psychiatrists simply repeated the diagnosis — and when they didn’t see any symptoms in Magnotta, which was often the case, they chalked it up to the illness being “in remission.”
As Chamberland said, “When a diagnosis is made, it is very hard to un-make,” with successive doctors reluctant to find that it was wrong in the first place.
“I would be the first, if (a diagnosis) was already made” to echo it, he said. Even if the patient he was seeing was showing no symptoms of schizophrenia, “I would re-prescribe and say it’s (the disease) in remission. One thing for sure, I would not remove the diagnosis.”
He pointed in the records to at least two psychiatrists who acknowledged that Magnotta seemed fine when they saw him, but nonetheless maintained the schizophrenia diagnosis.
Chamberland said there are two hypotheses that could explain Magnotta’s symptoms — the first, that he does suffer from schizophrenia, but the second, which he said is a better fit, that he has a personality disorder, which is a mental illness of a very different sort and not usually marked by hallucinations or delusions.
The hallucinations Magnotta occasionally claimed to suffer, Chamberland said, could also be better explained by a drug-induced psychosis.
About a month before the homicide, Magnotta told Dr. Joel Paris, the last psychiatrist he saw before he killed Lin, that his hallucinations had occurred only when he was younger and using drugs, including cocaine, heavily.
But in lengthy interviews with the two defence psychiatrists, Magnotta denied any periods of serious drug use. He also claimed to remember little of Lin’s slaying or dismemberment, but said on the night of the homicide, he’d heard a voice telling him to “stab it” or “kill it.”
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