Forensic Mental Violence

Mental Illness has been prevalent all throughout our history from Isaac Newton to Abraham Lincoln to Sylvia Plath and so on. These illnesses can be as minor as a slight bipolar disorder or as severe as schizophrenia. In recent years, mental illnesses are becoming more prevalent in our criminal justice systems than anywhere else. Mental illness is becoming an association with crime and based on the information that has been found, this paper will attempt to further define the problem of mental illness within our criminal justice system and offer alternatives or insights as to how to possibly help with this problem.

In recent years, there has been an increase in occurrence of individuals with mental disorders and violent crimes committed by those with mental illnesses. A major challenge in contemplating the relationship between mental disorders and violent behavior lies within how the two offer large portions of the same danger variables. Offenders with mental health issues have a tendency to participate in more deviant types of criminal acts than those without such issues. This paper is sought to synthesize the relationship among individuals who are mentally ill and why there are criminal acts followed by certain behaviors. The essential objective is to identify the problems, symptoms, and treatments for individuals who suffer from mental disorders.

While most people are concerned and want violent offenders punished and thrown in prison (which is a valid concern), it is rare that violent acts are committed by the mentally ill. For those crimes the mentally ill commits, prison may not always be the right answer; instead, proper treatment and rehabilitation would be much better. In general, the statement has always been made that the

Mental health and the criminal justice system have long been intertwined. Analyzing and understanding the links between these two subjects demands for a person to go in to depth in the fields of criminology, sociology, psychology, and psychiatry, because there are many points of view on whether or not a person’s criminal behavior is due to their mental health. Some believe that an unstable mental state of mind can highly influence a person’s decision of committing criminal actions. Others believe that mental health and crime are not related and that linking them together is a form of discrimination because it insinuates that those in our society that suffer from poor mental health are most likely to become a criminal due to their

This essay will look at the public understanding of the nature of mental disorder and to what extent it is associated with dangerousness and violence. The essay will begin by exploring the public’s perspectives and opinions on the matter and the impact that the mentally ill have on crime rates. Specific social perspectives will also be explored..

Throughout the years, the United States criminal justice system has been constantly incarcerating individuals who endure from a severe mental illness. People who suffer from serious mental illness are doubtlessly to be discovered in prison. There is a significant amount of mentally ill offenders that are placed in the state and federal institutions. The mentally ill are overpopulating the prisons. The criminal justice system is a deficiency for those who can profit more from the help of mental health treatment center or psychiatric hospital by sending individuals to correctional facilities or prisons. Today’s jails and prisons are being labeled as the new mental health hospitals for the mentally ill offenders. Commonly in today’s society, it generally takes other individuals who are willing to educate and support the mentally ill person into becoming successful in life.

3.2.2 The compromising of the mentally ill perpetrators Health to themselves and the general community

Historically, society has believed that people with mental disorders tend to be more violent than normal people, creating a stigma for patients. They thought that a mentally ill person tends to cause harm and chaos which was difficult for this person to deal with. In fact, research suggests that public opinions on the relationship between mental illness and violence do not reflect reality, although some people with psychiatric disorders commit violent crimes, it was not really clear about how much mental illness or substance abuse affect violent behaviour. Media had a great effect on people by making them think that the mentally ill are violent which was proved to be a myth, as they are more likely to be victims than offenders.

Over the past few decades, many researches have strived to test and explain the correlation between violence and crime and mental illness. Moore and Hiday (2006) assert that up 22% of inmates has a mental illness, sometimes containing more mental illness patients than many psychiatric units. Due to these statistics it is evident how important it is to understand the causes of the correlations between crime and violence and mental disorders. This proposal wishes to explain and understand the possible correlation and the reasons for such correlation between mental health illnesses and violence and crime. Further research to test

The independent variables were the criminogenic factors; these factors were summed up into 60 items- questions used in questionnaires; such as “before the age of 15, did you set fires”- that where AOT (assisted output treatment, programs that housed serious mentally ill patients), measured. The goal of these questionnaires was to create a scale that would allow prediction of past arrest rates, if conclusive the researches would be able to use the scale to predict future arrest rates. The 60 items included were drawn from the Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI), the Reactive-Proactive Aggression Questionnaire (RPAQ), & the Navaco Anger Scale (NAS). An exploratory factor analyses was used on 30 items, centered on arrest history and DSM-diagnosed substance use disorder and criminogenic screening instruments (LS/CMI). With these test the researches were able to identify a three-factor model, where the first factor was the history of antisocial behavior and antisocial personality that was constant with CIDI. The second dimension, current anger and aggression, corresponded to RPAQ and NAS items. The third factor, past violence, corresponded to CIDI. What these test reveled, was data that was interpreted numeracy into ratios between each item and arrest history. A psychotic symptom scale was created from 12 measures of delusion and hallucinations gathered from the

This study examined the predictors of repeated aggression on a maximum-security forensic psychiatric hospital by conducting a sudy, approved by the Institutional Review Board, in a 1,500 bed maximum-security forensic hospital located in the Los Angeles area. The subjects of the study were patients committed due to their inability to stand trial or found not guilty due to insanity.

The article chosen for critique was written by Leslie Zun, Lavonne Downey and Jodi Rosen which focused on a study which was focused on a program that was designed to reduce violence recurrence based in the ED inner-city minority youth population. Patients that were involved in this study were between ages 10-24 and were victims of interpersonal violence. Patients were assigned to either a control or treatment group. Control group was only provided a list of services while treatment group received an assessment and case management services for 6 months. Both groups were compared at end of study to determine the effectiveness in reducing violence recurrence by following primary indicators of reduction of self-reported injury, arrests, and state-reported

It is a structured assessment guideline developed for use in combination with a reliable and valid risk assessment instrument such as the HCR-20 (Historical Clinical Risk 20; Webster et al., 1997) in accordance with the overall SPJ approach. The instrument consists of two static and fifteen dynamic protective items each located in one of three domains: internal factors, external factors and motivational factors. It aims not only to assess protective factors, but also to inform treatment planning by identifying potential areas for intervention and it can offer valuable guidance in narrowing the gap between assessment and violence

Moreover, historical measures of risk and measures of psychopathy, impulsiveness and anger were greatly predictive of community violence (Doyle & Dolan 2006). Doyle and Dolan (2006) also suggested that dynamic clinical and risk management factors extrapolated from structured professional judgement (rated at discharge) added important incremental validity to the historical factors in predicting community violence. Furthermore,

A forensic assessment may be compulsory for individuals charged with a crime to establish if the accused has the legal capacity to stand trial. Once a person diagnosed with a mental illness is convicted of an offence, a comprehensive forensic report may be recommended to appeal the Court’s sentencing decision, since a person having a mental illness when the offence was committed may be an alleviating factor for. A forensic assessment may also be taken in the form of a risk assessment, to report about the relationship of the person’s mental illness and the risk of further offenses.