The notion of the therapeutic community emerged in the 1940s and was developed in the UK throughout the subsequent decades. Therapeutic communities developed participative approaches to working with people with long term mental illness. Usually residential, they offered a complete therapeutic milieu with therapists and patients living in the same environment and within the same [read the full story…]
Normally, we at the Learning Disabilities Elf like to look at learning disability specific research, but we thought this review of the utility of risk assessment tools was interesting and relevant to people with learning disabilities who come into contact with psychiatric and criminal justice services. Risk assessment research stresses the dynamic nature of predictors [read the full story…]
Risk assessment tools are widely used in psychiatric hospitals and criminal justice systems to help predict violent behaviour and inform sentencing and release decisions. Yet their predictive accuracy remains uncertain and expert opinion is divided, according to a new systematic review published in the BMJ. An international team of researchers led by Seena Fazel from [read the full story…]
A US review in 2009 suggested that the evidence on the rates of sex offending by people with learning disabilities was equivocal at best with some studies reporting an increased likelihood of people with learning disabilities committing sexual offences, with others suggesting the opposite to be the case. There are difficulties in answering the question [read the full story…]
Studies show that over 1.6 million people are killed as a result of violence each year and it is thought that this estimate is considerably less than the actual number who die from assaults. Violence in inpatient hospital settings and emergency departments is the subject of a NICE guideline that is currently being updated. A [read the full story…]
The evidence on the relationship between sexual abuse in childhood of adult sex offenders is mixed, with some studies showing higher rates of childhood sexual abuse in sex offenders and others showing no such relationship exists. The researchers in this study looked at the sexual and physical abuse histories of a number of adults with [read the full story…]
Mental Health courts were established in the USA in the 1990s, and were designed to help offenders with a mental health diagnosis who might end up in prison to have access to long-term community-based treatment. Mental health courts were piloted in England in 2009 to ensure that a defendant’s mental health or learning disability was [read the full story…]
Self-esteem is a concept well used in psychology to describe how a person evaluates their own worth and can be viewed positively and negatively. In this quantitative study, the researcher was interested in how prevalent low self-esteem was in a population of people with learning disabilities in a forensic service. She used an adapted version [read the full story…]
The government have published their new alcohol strategy for the United Kingdom. The last few years has seen a fall in the number of alcohol-related deaths in many other countries, but the UK has bucked this trend and has seen a rise in deaths from liver disease and an increase in hospital admissions related to [read the full story…]
In 2008, the Prison Reform Trust carried out work on the issues facing people with learning disabilities in the criminal justice system, resulting in the ‘No One Knows’ report which suggested they faced ‘personal, systemic and routine’ discrimination from the point of arrest through to release from prison. One key finding was that less than [read the full story…]
