Criminal and Mental Disorder

Criminal and Mental Disorder

Brutal, violent, and senseless crimes are usually committed by people who are mentally ill or sick is a popular misconception. Delusional disorder often accompanies other disorders like schizophrenia, organic mental disorder, paranoid personality disorder, and depression. In a major depression, more of the symptoms of depression are present, and they are usually more intense or severe. A major depression can result from a single traumatic event in your life, or may develop slowly as a consequence of numerous personal disappointments and life problems. Antisocial personality disorder (APD or ASPD) is a psychiatric diagnosis that interprets antisocial and impulsive behaviours as symptoms of a personality disorder. Psychiatry defines only pathological antisocial behavior; it does not address potential benefits of positive antisocial behavior or define the meaning of 'social' in contrast to 'antisocial'. In sum, then the resarch on the mental disordered and violence allows us to conclude the folling:

• Past mental disoreder alon, even sreious mental disorder, is not a good predictor of violence.

• Most persons who are currently mentally disordered are not violent.

• Violence is associated with current serious mental disorder, particularly when a history of violent behavior is also present.

• While researchers have deveolpoed some instruments to assess the likelihood

that a person will engage in violence, no one factor serves as a srong predictor; violent behavior seems to be a result of an accumulation of risk factors, unique to each individual.

Four categories of individuals are included: 1. defendants

found incompetent to stand trial, 2. individuals found not guilty by reason of insnity, 3. mentally disoreded sex offenderes, 4. mentally disordered inmates, including those administaively transferred from prison to a mental hosiptal (transfers).If a criminal defendant is found incompetenet to stand trial, the court has essentailly determined that he or she cannot understand the process that is occurring or effectively participate in it. The best known of the mentally disordered groups disscussed here, due to widespread publicity, are those who found not guilty by reason of insnaity (NGRI). Insanity refers to a person’s state of mind at the time an offense was committed. The M'Naghten Rule states that a person is not responsible for a criminal act if "at the time of committing the act, the party accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or if he did know it...he did not know he was doing what was wrong." There are three rules for determining whether an individual is insane. They are the M'Naghten rule (knowledge of right versus wrong), the Durham rule (product of mental disease or defect), and the Brawner rule (lacks substantial capacity to appreciate wrongfulness and conform conduct). There are differences of opinion about how conservative or liberal the law should be, who should make the decision about whether a defendant is insane, how we should assess temporary insanity after the fact, and whether a person should be considered sane until proven insane or vice versa. The Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984, signed into law on October 12, 1984, was the