Mental Illness & the Law 49 Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes
Defendants whose mental state is the real question: insanity pleas, competency and commitment.
- Season 1 · Episode 7
Uncivilized
When an eight-year-old boy is found murdered, a paroled child molester living nearby becomes the obvious suspect and a test case for locking up sex offenders indefinitely.
- Season 2 · Episode 2
Honor
When a young Afghan woman is found raped, stabbed and stoned in a park, suspicion moves from her secret fiancé to her diplomat father and her brother.
- Season 2 · Episode 5
Baby Killer
A seven-year-old who shot a classmate at recess is charged with murder until the gun leads detectives to a drug killing he witnessed.
- Season 2 · Episode 6
Noncompliance
A market manager is raped and shot, and the man charged is a schizophrenic who refuses medication, until the evidence points to the stabbed bystander he says he attacked to save her.
- Season 2 · Episode 21
Scourge
A man who believes he is doing God’s work kills four people in a day, and the push to execute him stalls when doctors find a disease his insurer knew about.
- Season 3 · Episode 8
Inheritance
A series of attacks on Asian women leads to the son of a jailed serial rapist, whose lawyer claims his violence is genetic.
- Season 4 · Episode 25
Soulless
A 15-year-old rape victim is taken from the hospital and killed, and the hunt for her attackers leads to wealthy teenagers and a valet hiding a violent childhood crime.
- Season 5 · Episode 3
Mother
A psychiatrist known for treating sex offenders is attacked and left in a drug den, and the investigation exposes her methods and a patient’s buried past.
- Season 5 · Episode 6
Coerced
A homeless man with untreated schizophrenia kidnaps a five-year-old he believes is his own son, and the hunt exposes both Stabler’s methods and a neglectful adult home.
- Season 5 · Episode 25
Head
A restroom voyeur’s hidden camera captures a sixth grader being sexually assaulted, and the trail leads to his school principal and a tumor in her brain.
- Season 6 · Episode 6
Conscience
A five-year-old is murdered after a birthday party, and the case against an unlikely young killer ends in a courthouse shooting by the victim’s father.
- Season 6 · Episode 9
Weak
A serial rapist preys on physically vulnerable women, and the detectives must rely on a witness with schizophrenia whose memories return as vivid, broken fragments.
- Season 6 · Episode 14
Game
An escort’s murder copies a scene from a violent video game, and the teenagers behind it claim they could not tell play from reality.
- Season 7 · Episode 14
Taboo
A newborn abandoned in the trash leads detectives to a brilliant student who denies ever being pregnant, and to a secret she shares with her father.
- Season 7 · Episode 17
Class
A scholarship student found strangled on a prostitution stroll turns out to have been paying for college with poker winnings, and her killer is the friend who shared her secret.
- Season 7 · Episode 22
Influence
A teenager’s false rape claim and a fatal crash reveal that she quit her bipolar medication on the word of a rock star.
- Season 8 · Episode 4
Uncle
A silent homeless man found with clippings about sex crimes becomes the first suspect in a double murder, until Munch recognizes him as his own uncle.
- Season 9 · Episode 1
Alternate
A woman with multiple personalities is suspected of harming the baby in her care, and her parents’ murder puts an insanity defense to the test.
- Season 9 · Episode 6
Svengali
A copycat murder modeled on an imprisoned serial killer’s crimes exposes how far his admirers will go for him, and one of them targets Benson.
- Season 9 · Episode 7
Blinded
A schizophrenic children’s author who abducts girls he mistakes for his sister blinds Stabler, and Benson and Novak each bend the rules over whether he should face execution.
- Season 9 · Episode 13
Unorthodox
The rape of a young boy turns suspicion on his Hasidic community until the trail leads to a bullied 14-year-old whose lawyer blames a sex-saturated culture.
- Season 9 · Episode 16
Closet
The murder of a gay man exposes his secret marriage to a star quarterback, who is outed, beaten and charged, while a press leak puts Benson under investigation.
- Season 10 · Episode 3
Swing
When Stabler’s daughter is arrested after breaking into a stranger’s home, a bipolar diagnosis forces him to turn to the mother he has kept out of his life.
- Season 10 · Episode 6
Babes
The killing of a mentally ill homeless man uncovers a teenage pregnancy pact, and the apparent suicide of its ringleader leads to the mother who bullied her online.
- Season 10 · Episode 10
Smut
A woman raped under a memory-erasing drug cannot say what happened, so SVU hunts for other victims of a man who films his attacks.
- Season 10 · Episode 15
Lead
The murder of a convicted pediatrician brings back ADA Alexandra Cabot and leads to a young man whose disability may have been caused by poisoned toys.
- Season 10 · Episode 22
Zebras
A paranoid killer walks free after a CSU technician’s paperwork error, and new murders seem to target everyone who crossed him, until SVU learns who is really behind them.
- Season 11 · Episode 12
Shadow
SVU teams with a Special Frauds detective to prove that a socialite who embezzled from a charity also murdered her wealthy parents.
- Season 11 · Episode 24
Shattered
A boy is snatched from a Manhattan street, and suspicion falls on his mother, an anthropologist who lost custody and wanted to take him abroad.
- Season 12 · Episode 2
Bullseye
When a starved girl is raped near a children’s club, a neighborhood anti-predator group and its eager volunteer push the squad toward a registered offender.
- Season 13 · Episode 8
Educated Guess
A drug-addled prisoner says he saw a rape inside a psychiatric hospital, and the patient who denies it turns out to be hiding years of abuse by a relative.
- Season 13 · Episode 10
Spiraling Down
A sting aimed at the men who paid to have sex with a 14-year-old runaway catches a former football star whose head injuries raise the question of whether he understood what he did.
- Season 14 · Episode 5
Manhattan Vigil
The kidnapping of a real estate heir’s young son leads Benson back to a boy who vanished from the same neighborhood 13 years earlier.
- Season 14 · Episode 19
Born Psychopath
A little girl’s injuries lead SVU to her ten-year-old brother, whose lack of empathy alarms the detectives and Dr. Huang as his parents try to protect him.
- Season 14 · Episode 24
Her Negotiation
A man Rollins arrests for flashing in Central Park refuses an easy plea, then attacks the witness against him, and his record shows a long history of escaping conviction.
- Season 16 · Episode 4
Holden's Manifesto
A socially isolated young man who blames women for his loneliness stabs women from his past, kills his neighbors and takes schoolgirls hostage.
- Season 16 · Episode 6
Glasgowman's Wrath
A girl is found stabbed in Inwood Hill Park after a hunt for an urban legend, her sister and their friend are missing, and a homeless man takes the blame.
- Season 17 · Episode 14
Nationwide Manhunt
When Greg Yates and Carl Rudnick escape from prison, SVU and Chicago detectives join a manhunt across upstate New York.
- Season 18 · Episode 4
Heightened Emotions
An Olympic-hopeful pole vaulter who secretly works as an escort accuses a client of rape, while Rollins takes in her newly paroled sister.
- Season 18 · Episode 9
Decline & Fall
A bartender who remembers nothing after a retail billionaire’s birthday party learns that two generations of his family had sex with her, and the patriarch claims he is too impaired to stand trial.
- Season 19 · Episode 10
Pathological
A disabled teenager’s sexual encounter at school leads SVU to discover that her mother has been faking and causing her illnesses for years.
- Season 19 · Episode 24
Remember Me Too
Charged after the hostage standoff, Lourdes Vega goes on trial while Benson tries to prove Miguel Lopez trafficked her, and his associates go after Stone’s sister.
- Season 20 · Episode 6
Exile
A woman found beaten and assaulted in an alley turns out to be a missing college student living on the street with no memory of who she was.
- Season 20 · Episode 7
Caretaker
A father and his two children are stabbed in their beds, and suspicion moves from the family’s devoted nanny to the children’s mother.
- Season 21 · Episode 8
We Dream of Machine Elves
Young women are found drugged with huge doses of DMT after being sexually assaulted, and the trail leads to a radical psychiatrist and his devoted followers.
- Season 22 · Episode 12
In the Year We All Fell Down
Benson walks into a standoff at a favorite restaurant, where the owner, ruined by a year of pandemic losses, holds her realtor at knifepoint.
- Season 22 · Episode 14
Post-Graduate Psychopath
Henry Mesner, the boy who shot Amaro, is released from a psychiatric facility at 18 and starts a killing spree that reaches Rollins’s family.
- Season 26 · Episode 22
Post-Rage
After a psychiatrist is raped and nearly blinded in her office, the squad works through her patient list while a killer who targets therapists strikes again.
- Season 27 · Episode 5
Feed the Craving
A doula’s client who says she is in labor with a stillborn baby conceived in a rape is abducted, then turns out never to have been pregnant, and the squad finds dozens of doulas she deceived.