A defence barrister for the Canberra teenager accused of trying to kill his university classmates and tutor with a baseball bat told a jury on Wednesday that it is abundantly clear he was mentally ill and impaired.
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But prosecutors urged the jury to approach the psychiatric evidence with extreme caution, arguing that as a science it had many shortcomings.
Mr Ophel, 19, is accused of attempting to murder four classmates and his tutor during a statistics tutorial at the Australian National University at 9.15am on August 25 last year.
The attack – which stopped when Mr Ophel was restrained – left two students with broken arms, while another two people suffered fractured skulls and another lost part of their finger.
Mr Ophel has pleaded not guilty by reason of mental impairment.
The question of Mr Ophel's mental impairment is what the jury must consider when it retires to decide its verdict on the five charges.
Prosecutor Shane Drumgold said in his closing address that none of the psychiatrists at the Canberra Hospital, where Mr Ophel was first accommodated after the attack, said he had schizophrenia.
He said the highest they could take it was that he was that he was "prodromal", or at an early stage.
The evidence said Mr Ophel could reason that what he was doing was wrong, he said.
Mr Drumgold also warned the ACT Supreme Court jury to approach the psychiatric evidence with exteme caution.
He said psychiatric diagnoses were reliant on the truthfulness of what the person said, and that such diagnoses could be fragile.
He said the diagnoses required looking back and cherry-picking from what was normal teenage behaviour to explain the attack as well as what the person reportde about themselves.
If a person knew what a psychiatrist was looking for when questioned, they might produce a positive diagnosis, he said.
The evidence said Mr Ophel could reason that what he was doing was wrong, Mr Drumgold said, and that the teenager could control his conduct.
The prosecutor said the Crown case was that Mr Ophel had looked up to school shooters in the US before stress from university pushed him over the edge, and he did what he had fantasised about for years.
In his closing address Barrister John Purnell SC argued the evidence showed it was abundantly clear Mr Ophel was both mentally ill and mentally impaired on the day of the attack.
He noted it was the defence who called the treating psychiatrist, and hospital mental health notes that said Mr Ophel had at one stage described his hand turning green and trying to strangle him.
The treating psychiatrist had given evidence that Mr Ophel was delusional at the time of the attack and that it was probable he had schizophrenia in the weeks and months preceding it, Mr Purnell said.
The barrister recounted how the victims had described Mr Ophel as dirty, angry and mad, not in control and unwashed during the attack.
While the arresting officer said Mr Ophel was dazed and not fully aware of his surroundings, talking in nonsensical way about a tree, and was licking his lips and poking his tongue out.
"Why wasn't that led [by the Crown]?" Mr Purnell asked in relation to the arresting officer's evidence. "Is that because there's a particular barrow the Crown is pushing?"
He said Mr Ophel had been "pathologically" open with his thoughts when questioned by psychiatrists.
Mr Ophel was truthful even to his own detriment at the time, he said.
The barrister also suggested that the doctors at the mental health ward could not have diagnosed schizophrenia because the diagnosis required observation over six months.
The trial continues.
