Mental illness and violence Flashcards
What did Star (1955) find when giving participants vignettes about mental illnesses?
They couldn’t identify they were mental illnesses but were united in the idea that the people described were dangerous.
What is the general public perception of people with MIs?
They are dangerous.
Did the increase in the public’s health literacy result in improved attitudes towards people with MI (Angermeyer & Matschinger, 2005)?
No, it resulted in an increase in the desire for social distance from people with schizophrenia.
What are peopl with MI less likely to have/get compared to other long-term health conditions/disabilities?
Find work, be in a steady long-term relationship, live in decent housing, be socially included in mainstream society, and substance misuse.
How effective was the ‘Guide’ in Canadian students in grade 11-12 (Milin et al., 2016)?
Those who completed the Guide showed increased MH knowledge and decreased stigma compared to controls.
But there was a big difference between groups before the Guide, effect is not strong, controls got worse on both measures, and improvement only occurred for ‘brighter’ students.
What did Simkiss et al. (2023) find when trying to improve attitudes toward MI in Welsh school children?
Those who did the curriculum showed an imporvement on pre and post on all measures.
Those who didn’t showed significantly less improvement and even decreased on lack of stigma and help-seeking behaviours.
What are the 4 methods of investigating MI and violence?
- Examine number of patients with psychotic illness in a prison and compare with controls.
- Examine records of patients with and without psychosis to see levels of violence in the past.
- Examine community to see proportion of people who became violent and psychotic.
- Examine aptients discharged from hopsital to examine rates of violent crime.
What are some possible confound when investigating MI and violence?
Age, gender, social class, institutionalisation, social problems (e.g., social drift).
What are the problems with examining the number of patients with a psychosis in a prison and comparing to controls?
People with psychosis may be overrepresented in prison population.
Violent acts are often used to help define illness.
People with MI may be more likely to be sent to prison.
People with MI may be detained longer than those without.
Likely to be differences in age, social status, etc. between the groups.
What are the problems of examining records of patietns with and without psychotic illness to see levels of violence in the past?
Violence often used to define MI.
May ahve had different lifestyles to those without psychosis.
What are the problems withe examining the community to see the proportion of people who become violent and psychotic?
Overlap indefinitions for some classifications and biases.
Measure is cross-sectional - don’t tell us about causal relationships.
Probelms with social drift, substance abuse etc.
What are the problems examining patients discharged from hospital to examine their rates of violent crime?
Ethics - have to release ‘dangerous’ people.
Now looking at a different population - those that have already been hospitalised.
Effects of confounds (e.g., social drift) still a problem.
Correcting for what attenuates the relationship between MI and violence according to Monahan (1993)?
Social class and institutionalisation
What did Bonta et al. (1998) find when looking for predictors of recidivism in MI and neurotypical offenders?
The predictors were the same for both - criminal history has large effect size, clinical variables had small or no effect size.
What did Harris et al.’s (1993) findings show and how did it effect the VRAG?
Negative relationship between schizophrenia and violent reoffending.
Schizophrenia is considered a protective factor in the VRAG.
What did Arseneault et al. (2000) find when looking at violence and MI in the Dunedin cohort?
People with schizophrenia were 2.5 times more likely to be violent in the past 12 months.
Many cases were due to excessive perceptions of threat.
There is conflicting evidence about violence and MI, what might be some of the reasons for this?
Some studies looked at people who had already been violent, whereas others looked more at the general population.
Maybe once someone is identified as violent and psychotic they are protected (managed) better than someone who is just violent.
May be some differences when looking at extreme violence.
Which psychotic symptoms might be associated wiht violence?
Threat/control-override delusions.
Command hallucinations.
What are TCO delusions?
Threat - people are out to get them.
Control-override - others are overriding their proscriptions against violence.
What did Link et al. (1998) find in terms of self-reported TCO symptoms and violence in the Isaeli men?
Those who had TCO delusions had elevated rates of violence and weapon use.
Specifically ‘people wish to do you harm’ and ‘thoughts put in your head’ delusions related to violence.
