I never met Nigel Latta in person. But our professional lives intersected.
Latta, who has died from stomach cancer aged 58, became one of our best-known psychologists: there was a time you couldn’t open a newspaper or turn on your TV without seeing his smiling face commenting on the news or narrating a TV show. Or you’ve read one of his books.
If you search the media for commentary by someone from the New Zealand psychology community Latta’s name comes up more than anyone’s. Four times more than mine does, and I’ve been trying really hard. Truth be told, I’ve sometimes been jealous of his success in bringing psychology (and some not-psychology) to the masses.
It all started in the early 2000s. Latta completed his clinical psychology training at the University of Auckland in 1995 and subsequently worked in various settings including as a forensic psychologist. Many of us first heard of him through his 2003 book Into the Darklands: Unveiling the Predators Among Us, which gave rise to a five-season true crime show he narrated.
I’m not surprised at the success of Darklands. We appear to have a drive to learn about people who offend horrifically. If I had to speculate, it’s because we are adapted to understand the causes of bad things so we can avoid them happening to us. Why do you think a majority of true crime involves a female victim, and women are disproportionately more interested in said true crime? Latta was talking about our backyard, not regaling us yet again about some American psychopath. Which is just scarier.
He later crossed the tracks into other, more mundane and therefore more widely relevant areas of “psychology”. I remember spending a week at a secondary school in the South Island where we were collecting data and running community education about adolescent mental health. There in the staff room was a poster for “An evening with Nigel Latta”. He was speaking about parenting, and it’s easy to see why he was a drawcard, having written several books on the subject including the airport bookshop-worthy Politically Incorrect Parenting. You know you’ve made it when that happens.
I used scare quotes back there around “psychology” because it’s fair to say Latta sometimes stepped outside the zone into less, ah, common places to expect a psychologist.
We shared a screen once. I was being interviewed by Jeremy Wells for an Eating Media Lunch segment on Latta’s appearance on an episode of Sensing Murder. Latta had been invited to take a drive-along with one of the show’s celebrity psychics and professed he was astounded by what he’d seen and couldn’t see any shenanigans that could explain it.
I’ve spent years teaching about psychic fraud and there’s no evidence to suggest that a psychic has any better idea who killed Jane Doe than Joe Bloggs who has been fed details of the crime. There have been 47 episodes of Sensing Murder and not only have there never been any breakthroughs in those cold cases as a result, but also that’s true of the hundreds of other cases similar shows around the world have aired. It was not, in my humble opinion, a credibility-enhancing move.
Which isn’t to say I wouldn’t love to have done that drive-along.
Watching from a distance, Latta had a gift. In fact several. He was very good at identifying what people wanted to learn about and exceptionally good at delivering it.
I always have to fight the urge to sound like a pointy-headed academic but Latta spoke to a vast slice of New Zealand in language that resonated with all of them. I was jealous but I can’t do what he did.
