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.
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Can we steer drug-using offenders away from crime and into treatment? Chris Sampson explores a study of the cost-effectiveness of diversion and aftercare programmes for offenders using class A drugs.
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Vishal Bhavsar summarises a recent cross-sectional study of violent and non-violent crime against adults with severe mental illness, which finds that service users were five times more likely to be victims of assault, and three times more likely to be victims of household acquisitive crime.
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Debut blogger Vishal Bhavsar summarises an Israeli population-based study that explores the links between schizophrenia and violent crime. He calls on researchers to focus on people with schizophrenia as victims rather than perpetrators of crime.
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Whilst estimates of the numbers of people with learning disabilities in the criminal justice system are unreliable because of definitional confusions, there is a recognition that their experience can be confusing and isolating.
Here Sian Anderson looks at a review of published studies which represented the voices of people with learning disabilities themselves to help understand just how they experience the criminal justice system.
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Mark Horowitz summarises the new WHO and UCL Institute of Health Equity (Michael Marmot) report and research paper on social determinants of mental health. He concludes that it’s time to focus on the root causes of mental distress, namely poverty, unemployment, poor education and social isolation.
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Professor Jill Manthorpe begins 2015 with a blog considering a systematic review on interventions to prevent and respond to violence against disabled people. She reflects on how social workers use systematic review papers as part of evidence based practice and gives some useful pointers for reading and getting the most from such studies.
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Elena Marcus summarises a double case-cohort study, which investigates the risk of suicide and criminal behaviours in people with bipolar disorder and their siblings, compared with the general population.
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Kathryn Walsh summarises a recent systematic review on crime, fear of crime and mental health, which highlights a number of interventions that are not effective in reducing the fear of crime.
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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.
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