Ch 8 Crime & Mental Disorder Flashcards
Mental illness
Term used for a variety of psychiatric diagnoses that indicate that the individual has problems in living; also referred to as mental disorder
Intellectual disability
Limitations in cognitive capacity, determined by IQ tests and a variety of performance measures. Cannot be cured, but can be compensated by care and training. Formerly called mental retardation.
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)
The official guidebook or manual, published by the American Psychiatric Association, used to define and diagnose specific mental disorders. Now in its fifth revised edition (DSM-5).
Schizophrenia
Mental disorder characterized by severe breakdowns in thought patterns, emotions, and perceptions.
Hallucinations
Things or events that a person with mental disorder sees or perceives. Characteristic of schizophrenia and some forms of dementia.
Delusional disorder
Mental disorder characterized by a system of false beliefs or delusions.
Major depressive disorder
General label for symptoms that include an extremely depressed state, general slowing down of mental and physical activity, and feelings of self-worthlessness.
Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD)
A disorder characterized by a history of continuous behavior in which the rights of others are violated.
Conduct disorder (CD)
A diagnostic label used to identify children who demonstrate habitual misbehavior.
Adjudicative competence
The ability to participate in a variety of court proceedings.
Competency to stand trial
The legal requirement that a defendant is able to understand the proceedings and to help the attorney in preparing a defense.
Incompetent to stand trial (IST)
A judicial ruling that a criminal defendant, because of mental illness, defect, or other reasons, is unable to understand the nature and objective of the criminal proceedings or is unable to assist his or her defense lawyer. May apply to a variety of judicial stages including plea bargaining, trial, and sentencing.
Insanity defense
A criminal defendant’s argument that his or her mental illness relieves him or her from responsibility for a crime. Legal tests of insanity vary widely, with the most common being the ability to know right from wrong.
Not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI)
A legal determination that a defendant was so mentally disordered at the time of the crime that he or she cannot be held criminally responsible.
M’Naghten Rule
An insanity standard based on the conclusion that if a defendant has a defect of reason, or a disease of the mind, so as not to know the nature and quality of his or her actions, then he or she cannot be held criminally responsible. Also called the right and wrong test.
Brawner Rule
A standard for evaluating the insanity defense that recognizes that the defendant suffers from a condition that substantially (1) affects mental or emotional processes, or (2) impairs behavior controls. Also called the ALI/Brawner Rule.
Caveat paragraph
A section of the ALI/Brawner Rule that excludes abnormality manifested only by repeated criminal or antisocial conduct. It was specifically designed to disallow the insanity defense for psychopaths.
Durham Rule
A rarely used legal standard of insanity that criminal defendants are not criminally responsible if their unlawful act was the product of mental disease or defect. Also known as the Product Rule.
Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984
A law designed to make it more difficult for defendants using the insanity defense in the federal courts to be acquitted.
Volitional prong
The part of the insanity defense that requires acceptance of the possibility that a defendant could not control his or her behavior to conform to the requirements of the law. The volitional prong is not recognized in federal law or the law of many states.
Guilty but Mentally Ill (GBMI)
A verdict alternative in some states that allows defendants with mental disorders to be found guilty even if they might meet standards for insanity. The verdict is said to afford them treatment in prison settings, but such treatment is not guaranteed.
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
A cluster of behavioral patterns that result from a psychologically distressing event outside the usual range of human experience.
Dissociative identity disorder
A psychiatric syndrome characterized by the existence within an individual of two or more distinct personalities, any of which may be dominant at any given moment. Formerly called multiple personality disorder (MPD).
Iatrogenic
A process whereby mental or physical disorders are unintentionally induced or developed in patients by physicians, clinicians, or psychotherapists.
Amnesia
Complete or partial memory loss of an incident, series of incidents, or some aspects of life’s experiences.
Threat assessment
Process of determining the likelihood and seriousness of harm carried out by a person who displayed warning signs, such as making veiled oral or written threats.
Duty to warn
Requirement from the Tarasoff case that clinicians must actively warn potential victims of threats of serious bodily harm made by their clients.
Duty to protect
Requirement from the Tarasoff case that clinicians must take steps to protect possible victims from serious bodily harm as a result of threats made by the clinicians’ clients. The duty to protect does not require that the clinician contact the potential victim.
Structured professional judgment (SPJ)
An approach to risk assessment that combines the strength of actuarial predictions with the experiences of the practitioners. SPJ offers guidelines for providing the risk assessment.
Mental Disorder
• A major disturbance in an individual’s thinking, feelings, or behavior
that reflects a problem in mental function.
• Must distress self or others (“major disturbance”)
• Most are symptomatically stable, many require 6 months of presence
• Not a symptom of some other medical condition*; for example,
• Vitamin B12 deficiency
• Somnambulance
• LSD
• Developmental delay, mental retardation, Trisomy 21
Mental Disorder Major Types
• Mood disorder
• Personality disorder
• Compulsive disorder
• Psychotic disorder
• Somatic disorder
• Neurodevelopmental disorder
• Sexual and paraphilic disorder
• Trauma-based disorder
• Identity disorder
• Substance use disorder
Personality Disorder
• Significantly distressing or harmful
patterns of thinking, feeling, or behaving
that depart significantly from cultural
norms:
• Way of thinking about oneself and
others
• Way of responding emotionally
• Way of relating to other people
• Way of controlling one’s behavior
Personality Disorder
and Crime
• Antisocial personality disorder
• Pervasive pattern of disregard for, and
violation of, the rights of others.
• 0.6% of population; ~47% of male inmates
and ~21% of female inmates
• Psychopathy—an extreme version, we will
have a whole lecture about it
• Borderline personality disorder
• Pervasive pattern of instability of
interpersonal relationships, self-image, and
affects, and marked impulsivity, and present
in a variety of contexts.
• ~1.5% of population; 12% to 30% of inmates
Psychotic Disorder
• Dysfunction of thought, logic, or perception sufficient to depart from reality as
conventionally understood.
• Hallucination: Perceiving sensory stimuli that does not exist.
• Delusion: Thoughts or beliefs persistently held despite conflicting evidence; grossly
illogical or irrational.
• Usually thematic: Paranoid, Persecutorial, Grandiose, Supernatural or Theistic…
• May be bizarre or non-bizarre
• Disorganization: Inability to control mentation, affect, communication, and goal-
directed physical behavior.
• Negative manifestation: The absence of otherwise normal functioning without a clear
biomedical origin; catatonia, mutism.
Psychotic Disorder and Crime
• Paranoid delusion
• Convinced that someone is mistreating,
conspiring against, or planning to harm you or
your loved one
• Grandiosity
• Convinced of having special attributes consistent
with being superhuman in some way
• Bipolar disorder
• Extreme fluctuation in a person’s mood, energy,
and functionality absent a logical context
• May also be present with hallucination (Type I) or
without (Type II)
• ~2.5% of population; ~10% to ~24% of inmates
Paraphilic Disorder
Sexual arousal and gratification stably contingent upon atypical or harmful stimuli.
• May center on stimulus state, behavior, or both.
• Is biopsychosocially maladaptive in some way.
• May be present as a single or multiple expression.
• Heterogenous phenomenon even when the target of arousal is identical.
Paraphilic Disorder and Crime
Criminal paraphilia in the US:
• Non-teleiophilic sexual behavior (adult-minors, minors with significant age difference) —Child molestation, infantophilia, pedophilia, hebephilia, ephebophilia.
• Bestiality or Zoophilia —Animals, living
• Incest —First or second degree relatives
• Necrophilia— Deceased humans
• Rape or raptophilia, erotophonphilia —Coercive Sexual behavior
Courtship disorder —Voyeurism, exhibitionism, frotteurism
Less clear but sexual and sometimes against the law, for example: Trichophilia, hematolagnia, partialism, fetishism
Substance Use Disorder
• Uncontrolled use of a substance despite harmful effects on self and others.
• May involve:
• Dependency —A physiological state whereby an exogenous substance is required for normal functioning.
• Tolerance —A physiological circumstance whereby the amount of exogenous substance required to yield an effect increases over time.
• 65% to 85% of the prison population eligible for
SUD diagnosis.
actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea
“the act does not make a person guilty unless the mind be also guilty”
• Mens rea
• “guilty mind”
• Actus reus
• “guilty act”
• Mitigation and aggravation
Insanity and Competency
Distinct concepts: defendant’s mental state/capacity at two different points in
time.
• Insanity Defense
• “What was the defendant’s state of mind at the time the offense was
committed?”
• Competency to stand trial
• “What is the defendant’s state of mind at the present time, or at the time of
the pretrial proceedings or trial?”
Not Guilty by Reason
of Insanity (NGRI)
• Insanity is a purely legal term
• Used only in context of a criminal
offense
• Refers only to state of mind at the
time an offense was committed
• Trier of fact finds that the person could
not be held responsible due to mens rea
being impossible
• Not equivalent to mental disorder
Insanity Standards
• Two Criteria
• Irrationality » Person was not
in control of his or her mental
processes at the time of the
offense
• Compulsion » Person was not
in control of his or her
behavior at the time of the
offense
Unique Defenses
• PTSD
• Battered woman syndrome
• Dissociative identity disorder
• Iatrogenic effect
• Pathological gambler’s syndrome
• Amnesia
• Alcohol/drugs
• Night terror/Sleepwalking
Some Research on Violence and Mental Disorder
• Mental disorder, even when serious, is not necessarily a
good predictor of violence
• The mental disorder most closely associated with extreme
violence is psychosis
• The mental disorder most closely associated with crime in
general is substance use disorder
• The mental disorder most closely associated with general
violent crime is APD; and with civil litigation is BPD
• The mental disorder most closely associated with sex crimes
is paraphilia
• All research: No single factor, including mental health Dx,
predicts with certainty.
