Mental disorder and homicide: are rates and sentencing patterns changing?

featured

Danny Whiting reports on a study of mental health problems and long-term national trends in rates and court outcome for people convicted of homicide.

[read the full story...]

Life after leaving hospital: when does a duty of care end?

shutterstock_1447419326

Sally McManus writes her debut elf blog on a recent national cohort study of multiple adverse outcomes following first discharge from psychiatric care, which finds that mental health inpatients are more likely to experience all types of adversity after leaving hospital.

[read the full story...]

#PreventableHarm discussion 20/7/16: Can risk assessment in mental health be evidence-based?

PreventableHarm

Can risk assessment in mental health be evidence-based? Join us for the #PreventableHarm discussion in London on Wed 20th July 2016. This free open ‘question time’ style debate is being organised by the UCL Division of Psychiatry, The Lancet Psychiatry and the National Elf Service.

[read the full story...]

Common mental health disorders linked with increased risk of violent reoffending in ex-prisoners

shutterstock_161064980

Ian Cummins considers the implications of a new cohort study of convicted prisoners in Sweden, which links psychiatric disorders with violent reoffending.

[read the full story...]

Depression to blame for violent crime? The curse of the headline writers

shutterstock_244461550

Laurence Palfreyman highlights a population study from researchers at Oxford University, which investigates the links between depression and violent crime. The study finds that people with depression were three times more likely to have been convicted of violent crime than those without depression, but we need to be careful about how we interpret these relative risk figures.

[read the full story...]

People with mental illness are more likely to be victims of homicide than perpetrators of homicide

MarcaDeMorto(sup)

Dave Steele reports on a recent observational case series published in the Lancet Psychiatry, which concludes that patients with mental illness are two and a half times more likely to be victims of homicide than the general population.

[read the full story...]

Preventing serious adverse outcomes in schizophrenia

shutterstock_160959176-150x150

People diagnosed with schizophrenia are 7.4 times more likely to be convicted of violent offences, 8.1 times more likely to die prematurely, and 20.7 times more likely to kill themselves.

[read the full story...]

New meta-review highlights the best approaches for preventing violence in young people

Young man with shot gun

The WISQARS Leading Causes of Death website is a mine of information for researchers and bloggers alike. I searched it to find out what the leading causes of death are for people (all races, both sexes) in the US aged 10-24 years. The top three in 2010 were: Unintentional injury (e.g. road traffic accidents, poisoning, [read the full story…]

Released prisoners have an increased risk of death compared to the rest of the population, particularly from drugs, suicide and homicide

Open prison door

Nearly 10 million people were in prison in 2008, according to estimates provided by the World Prison Population List (Walmsley, 2009). The United States tops the imprisonment league table with 2.3 million individuals behind bars, that’s 756 per 100,000 of the population. Whatever your view on the US legal system and incarceration, it’s interesting to [read the full story…]

High suicide rate in Northern Ireland linked to alcohol abuse

iStock_000000838980XSmall message in a bottle

‘Suicide and homicide in Northern Ireland’ is a new report from the National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Homicide by People with Mental Illness. The report shows that there are links between alcohol use and the increased suicide rate that has been seen in Northern Ireland over recent years. Suicide has been falling elsewhere in the [read the full story…]