Psychologist Anna Lawler ’95 is a puzzle solver, putting together the different pieces of the personalities of troubled individuals — from children entangled in custody battles to murderers on death row.
“I come in, gather facts, make recommendations, and move on,” she explains. “I tend to focus on their social and personal history,” she continues, noting that her double major in psychology and history at Colgate turned out to be the perfect starting point for her eventual career. “History taught me how to synthesize events and to look for meaning [in the] narrative.”
Lawler first grew interested in psychology as a teenager listening to the conversations around her Brooklyn dinner table between her father and his good friends, a couple who worked in mental health. “I thought, ‘You talk to people all day?’” she remembers with a laugh. “It doesn’t get any better.” She still feels that way, even though many of those she spends her time with have sad or frightening stories to unravel. “But someone can commit horrific crimes and also be a terrific son,” she observes.
Her focus on forensics as a graduate student at Drexel University came about serendipitously because she couldn’t get into her initial choice of a research lab on eating disorders. Instead, Lawler applied to join the lab of a professor who was performing psycho-sexual evaluations on developmentally disabled sex offenders who were on probation and in treatment. “That was not the population I thought I wanted to study,” she says, “but the professor became a huge role model.”
During her years in private practice and consulting with a variety of mental health agencies in southeastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Lawler has made determinations regarding competency to stand trial, sanity at the time of offense, risk of violent behavior, and malingering. She’s also seen a lot of death penalty cases. “The defendant’s attorneys might hire me
to tease out the good part. What was the path that got this person to this point? I might also interview parents and caregivers. If someone says, ‘I’ve been hearing voices since I was 12,’ then I’m going to uncover the records that support that trajectory.
“When you read about a horrific crime in the newspaper and think, ‘That person’s a monster,’ it’s never as simple as that.”
In 2009 Lawler pivoted toward a different specialty: working as a contractor for nuclear power plants to help them determine if employees or job candidates are appropriate for unescorted access or fit for duty. “The nuclear industry is guided by specific federal regulations because of the potential dangers to the greater community,” she says. “Part of that concerns concrete, mandated processes about who gets unescorted access at a nuclear power plant.” When standard background checks or psychological testing raise potential flags, or if the individual requires a higher level of access, Lawler steps in. “The biggest values in nuclear workplaces are trustworthiness and reliability,” she says. “I make a recommendation about that. I say, ‘I think he’s stable and reliable’ or ‘I’m worried about his depression or the fact that he lied about something.’”
Whether working on forensic cases or for the nuclear industry, the interviews she conducts never fail to surprise Lawler. “The people I see are often facing so much stress — they’re caretaking for a very sick child, their parent just died a few weeks ago — and I’m amazed that they’ve stayed out of trouble or have kept showing up for work,” she marvels. “I’ve learned so much from their resilience.”