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24 Crim. Behav. & Mental Health 1 (2014)

handle is hein.journals/cbmh24 and id is 1 raw text is: 

Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health
24: 1-4 (2014)
Published online in Wiley Online Library
(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/cbm.1895

Fear of the (almost) unknown






MATTHEW LARGE1'2, ANDREI GOLENKOV' AND OLAV NIELSSEN2,4
   'Prince of Wales Hospital, Sydney, Australia; 2University of New South
   Wales, Sydney, Australia; 3Psychiatry and Medical Psychology, Chuvash State
   University, Cheboksary, Russia; 4Clinical Research Unit for Anxiety and
   Depression, St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, Australia


   'The  psychiatrist is the friend of the patient but the servant of society'
                 (Russian aphorism of uncertain origin)

   In this issue of the journal, Sturup and Lindqvist help fill the void of data on the
factors associated with serious recidivism, with their report on violent recidivism in
a cohort of 174 people convicted of homicide  in Sweden  during the decade
1971-1980  (Sturup and Lindqvist, 2014). Twenty-two (13%) of these offenders
had a psychotic illness and five (3%) had committed a previous homicide. One
hundred and fifty-three were followed after the index homicide for an average of
over 21 years, during which time 15 committed further serious offences, including
five homicides. Only one of the recidivist homicide offenders had a diagnosed psy-
chotic illness; the remaining nine members of the cohort who had committed ear-
lier or later homicides had been diagnosed with personality disorder. However, five
of the 15 serious recidivists suffered from psychosis, which was the only clinical
factor that was significantly associated with repeat offending.
   In a previous issue of the journal we reported a 30-year retrospective study
of homicide offenders with schizophrenia from the Chuvash  Republic of the
Russian Federation  between  1981 and  2010  (Golenkov  et al., 2013). We
found that 16  (11%) of the 149  homicide offenders with schizophrenia had
committed  a previous homicide. We  found some possible risk factors - living
in a rural area and dissocial personality traits - but a limitation of the study
was  that we  were not  able to examine  whether  homicide  offenders with
schizophrenia were  more  likely to commit  a second homicide  than  other
homicide  offenders.
   It is widely believed that schizophrenia is a risk factor for homicide recidivism.
Although  this may well be true, the assumption is largely on the basis of the
findings of a single study from Finland with a small number of cases. The Finnish
study found that four of the 93 (4%) homicide  offenders with a diagnosis of


Copyright t 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


  24: 1-4 (2014)
DOI: 10.1002/cbm

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