Monster: The Ed Gein Story delves into the serial killer’s arrest and psychiatric assessment that led to him spending the rest of his life in hospital, but it left out the full details of the real mental report.
After murdering hardware store owner Bernice Worden in 1957, Ed Gein was arrested and charged with first-degree murder in the Waushara County Court. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and underwent a psychiatric examination.
We see the serial killer diagnosed with Schizophrenia in the Netflix series, but here’s what he was diagnosed with in real life, and exactly what the doctors said.
Credit: Netflix
Ed Gein didn’t display normal signs of Schizophrenia
A transcript of the real-life interviews was included in the book The Ed Gein File by John Borowski, revealing that doctors diagnosed him with “schizophrenic reaction of the chronic undifferentiated type” that had been going on for “an undetermined number of years”.
This means he did meet the criteria for the mental disorder, but he didn’t fit into any of the five subtypes that are usually displayed by people with the condition.
They said his crimes were “morbid (and) ghoulish… with exhumation of several bodies and the fashioning of masks from the heads” and Gein “may have hallucinated on some occasions”.
Gein told them he heard his mother’s voice “telling him to be good” and said he often “stated that he has seen faces in piles of leaves”. He also claimed to have smelt decaying flesh around his house, which was “probably an olfactory hallucination”.
He didn’t know the difference between ‘right and wrong’
The doctors concluded that Ed “had been withdrawn, limited in his contacts over a period of years and failed to develop emotionally in a normal manner”.
They described him as “an outside force” that was uncontrollable and evil, and said this is what influenced him to kill his two victims and dig up graves.
“Because his judgement is so influenced by his envelopment in a world of fantasy, he is not considered to know the difference between right and wrong,” they said.
Credit: Netflix
But he was ‘intellectually adequate’ and had a normal IQ
During the evaluation, doctors also determined his IQ. Gein scored a 106 on the verbal test and 89 on the performance test, giving him an IQ of 99. The average IQ is around 100.
“There are indications that subject is better than average intelligence, but here again is shown inefficient functioning,” the doctors said in the report.
They concluded that he was “intellectually adequate” and said he had an “average fund of school and general knowledge” but “his thinking may be tangential and alogical at times”.
“In general, the impairments would indicate a strong emotional disturbance which would be psychotic in nature,” the report added.
However, a psychiatrist has claimed his mental diagnosis would actually be very different if it was done today, with modern technology.
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Featured image by: Netflix
