Mentall Illness and Offenders Flashcards
Do prisoners have higher percentages of mental illnesses compared to the general population?
Yes, far higher
Why is there such a big discrepancy between prisoner and general populations characteristics?
Howitt (2011) believed it is due to three confounding factors:
1) Socio-economic status
2) Diagnostic bias
3) Public perceptions
In 1996/7 there were 500 homicide cases, what were the levels of mental disorders for the offenders?
44% had a record of mental disorder at some time in their life
14% had symptoms of mental illness at the time of the offence
8% had contact with mental health services in the year before the offence.
Is mental illness common?
Yes it is very common in the general population.
What is schizophrenia?
It is a complex mental illness in which the sufferer has problems differentiating real experiences from unreal experiences, has problems in thinking logically about issues and to behave as others do in social situations.
What is antisocial personality disorder?
This is a mental disorder characterised by persistent disregard for the rights of others and violations of these rights. Sufferers are considered deceitful and manipulative. The term is not applied to persons under 18 years of age.
What is the diagnostic bias?
This is the biases that can happen whilst diagnosing someone.
The DSM has changed from since its first release and one of the things that has changed is the percentage of violence as a criterion. Violence was only a small percent of criterion but that has increased a lot.
One other reason for diagnostic bias is the circularity in diagnosing. What happens is we give a diagnosis based on their behaviour and then we use said diagnosis to explain said behaviour.
How does the public perception affect this discrepancy?
Media shapes the publics views about the dangerousness of the mentally ill.
When there has been a highly publicised violent incident involving the mentally ill, the publics attitude towards the mentally ill becomes more negative.
What did Link et al. (1992) find when comparing mental health patients to never-treated community residents?
Mental health patients had higher rates of violent and illegal behaviour
What did Swanson et al. (1990) find when looking at the violent behaviour of a community sample?
Out of the people who said they’d engaged in violent behaviour:
4% Schizophrenia/major affective disorder
14% substance abuse
17% mental disorder and substance abuse
What did Hodgins (1992) find from his study of 15,000 people born in Stockholm in 1953?
Men: 32% with no mental disorder but 50% with major mental disorder were criminal
Women: 6% non-mentally ill versus 19% of mentally ill became criminals
The risks were somewhat greater for violent than for non-violent crime.
What is co-morbidity and why is it important to remember when discussing mentally ill and crime?
Co-morbidity is the presence of a disease or condition in addition to the one of primary interest and their resulting combined effect.
Mental illness often has co-morbidity with alcoholism and drug abuse.
