Previous studies have suggested that people with mild learning disability show a higher rate of offending when compared with peers without learning disability and that this rate is especially high in those aged under 18. High rates of learning disability have also been found in studies of young offenders in custody. In the U.S., one [read the full story…]
One outcome measure of forensic services is the rate of re-offending. The author of this review was interested in this outcome, but in particular the contribution to this of speech and language therapy services. The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists recommend the involvement of speech and language therapy intervention in support to people [read the full story…]
This study from the Netherlands looked at whether it is possible to determine differences in personal characteristics and functioning between juvenile offenders under mandatory treatment orders who had a measured IQ of less than 70, between 70 and 85 and over 85. The authors were hoping to offer advice and guidance on ways to better [read the full story…]
Mental health problems amongst people with learning disabilities have been found to be more prevalent than amongst the general population, although estimates of prevalence rates vary. The authors of this paper were keen to consider whether the recovery approach to mental illness was applicable to people with learning disabilities and mental health needs. The origin [read the full story…]
Clozapine is an atypical antipsychotic medication used to treat the symptoms of schizophrenia, most usually used as a treatment of last resort where people have not responded to other anti-psychotic treatments. It has a number of severe side effects including and can also cause the excessive production of saliva and weight gain.. The researchers in [read the full story…]
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…]
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 researchers in this UK study set out to look at empathy in sex offenders with learning disabilities, with a view to exploring the differences between this group and non offenders with learning disabilities. They used specific measures of the components of empathy. They compared the scores of 21 sex-offenders and 21 non-offenders with learning [read the full story…]
