Beck Depression Inventory

The Beck Depression Inventory is a psychological assessment instrument mentioned during the trial of Alice Espanet. The book provides no score, findings, or account of its administration to Alice; its significance lies instead in how the inventory enters the courtroom’s effort to describe her mental state, and in the narrator’s doubts about what written measures can establish.

Appearance in the Trial

The prosecution’s experts introduce the Beck Depression Inventory alongside the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale. The discussion is presented in an impersonal, academic manner, followed by a list of traits attributed to Alice, including narcissism, low empathy, and a tendency to idealize some people while despising others. The inventory is part of this sequence of psychological language, not a reported diagnosis or a stated test result. The text does not say that either measure was administered to Alice, and it gives no numerical findings from either one.

The manner of presentation matters. The jurors lose interest during the technical account and the reading of Alice’s characteristics. One expert then departs from the prepared approach, distinguishing a disorder from a person’s way of being and arguing that Alice could do wrong and live with it afterward. That shift makes the inventory’s courtroom role legible: it belongs to an attempt to render a person intelligible through psychological categories, but it does not settle what those categories mean or whether they establish a disorder.

Measurement and the Limits of Evidence

The question of diagnosis is made explicit when the prosecutor asks whether the diagnosis of Alice’s postpartum psychosis rests on her conduct and her own account. The psychiatrist agrees, noting that there is no official diagnosis to confirm it. The exchange places assessment in a difficult evidentiary position: the case turns partly on interpreting behavior and testimony, while the inventory appears in the broader discussion of psychological evaluation without a disclosed result that could resolve that dispute.

The legal question is distinct from the inventory itself. The defense invokes Article 20.1 of the Spanish Criminal Code, which exempts a person from criminal responsibility when a mental disorder prevents them from understanding the unlawfulness of an act or acting in accordance with that understanding. The inventory is not presented as proof that this legal standard has been met. Later, the court substitutes outpatient psychiatric treatment for imprisonment, but the account does not attribute that decision to the Beck Depression Inventory or to any score from it.

The Narrator’s Counterpoint

The Narrator resists treating inventories as decisive explanations. Reflecting on the twins’ deaths, she says that whether Alice was governed by thoughts classified as egosyntonic or egodystonic does not answer the question of which twin died first; Alice says she cannot remember, and the forensic evidence establishes only that both died at roughly the same time. The Beck and Edinburgh inventories become, in this passage, marks on paper: terms that cannot recover the missing sequence or erase the event’s uncertainty.

That skepticism sits beside the Narrator’s own account of motherhood, which resists simple categories. After three months without more than three consecutive hours of sleep, repeated visits to monitor a newborn’s weight, and close attention to the baby’s bodily symptoms, she describes maternal identity as having displaced her former selves. She also writes of boredom, confinement, and the wish to get away, while describing the intense tenderness of reunion with her son and hoping that contact with life might eventually appear in her writing. These experiences do not explain Alice’s actions or diagnose anyone; they establish why the book is wary of reducing the pressures and contradictions of motherhood to a form or label.

Narrative Significance

The Beck Depression Inventory functions less as a source of answers than as a small, concrete emblem of the trial’s competing ways of knowing. Psychological instruments offer an organized vocabulary, yet the scene in which they are invoked loses the jury’s attention, and the case still depends on contested accounts, expert interpretation, and a legal judgment about responsibility. The Narrator’s image of words as dark marks on white paper sharpens the contrast between recording a condition and comprehending a life. The book neither supplies the inventory’s results nor dismisses assessment outright; it leaves the measure in view while emphasizing what the available evidence cannot make certain.