Characterisation & Clinical Outcome of Mentally-Disordered Offenders
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Characterisation of, and Prediction of Clinical Outcomes in, Mentally Disordered Offenders
IRAS ID
98463
Contact name
Ottilie Sedgwick
Contact email
Research summary
Specialist high security psychiatric NHS hospitals in the UK provide treatment and security for people with mental disorders who are in compulsory detention because of their dangerous or violent behaviour. These individuals are known in the scientific literature as ’mentally-disordered offenders’, a legal term relating to those offenders who have any disorder of the mind. Throughout this application, individuals residing at Broadmoor Hospital will be referred to as mentally disordered offenders, or patients.
Current treatment does not work for some patients and it is not clear why. Furthermore, when patients are released, after their condition is considered to be under control, a significant proportion reoffend. Current methods of assessing the patient before and after treatment are vague, and not able to exclude the possibility that a patient may be motivated to fake improvement in order to secure an early discharge. Most previous studies of mentally disordered offenders have tended to ignore the different causes of violence. There is evidence from our previous small scale studies that, within a population of mentally disordered offenders, those with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, personality disorder (PD), or comorbid diagnoses of PD and schizophrenia may be characterised by different emotional and cognitive dysfunction profiles. For example, PD patients with a history of violence show a deficient fear response while those with schizophrenia and a similar violence history show an excessive fear response to anticipated threat (Kumari et al., 2009, Schizophrenia Research). The proposed research intends to fill this gap by trying to understand the differences and similarities between patients with schizophrenia alone, PD alone or a comorbid diagnosis (both schizophrenia and PD) residing in a high security hospital (Broadmoor Hospital) and then to explore which characteristics of these patient groups are associated with good/poor clinical outcome following the treatments currently offered to mentally disordered offenders.
REC name
London - Camberwell St Giles Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
14/LO/0238
Date of REC Opinion
14 Mar 2014
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion