Risk Factors for Criminal Offending of Patients Suffered from Epilepsy

Abstract

Study material: 148 male offenders with the proved diagnosis of epilepsy, stayed for inpatient forensic psychiatric evaluation.

Risk factors could be relevant to clinical psychopathological (mechanisms of aggressive actions, primary syndrome, a course of the disorder) and different social and psychological factors such as social maladjustment (unemployed person, absence of the trade, not qualified physical work), poor living conditions, family disturbances with aggressive attitudes of patients in family and susceptibility to antisocial influence from others; alcohol abuse, repeated committing of criminal offences both before and after the onset of the disease, breach of a hospital regimen, particularly - a violent behavior. The syndromal description of the patient's condition has provided us with key data that allowed to make an opinion of the probability of committing a new crime and of its potential severity. Social dangerousness of patients with psychotic conditions (delirium, hallucinations, impairment of coinsciousness, paroxysmal states) could be found at the periods of psychotic manifestations. The social dangerousness of patients with negative symptoms (personality changes, dementia signs) is relatively stable. There has been a prevalence of situation driven negative and personality mechanisms such as affective control loss and intellectual incapacity. Assessing the dangerousness of the patients with positive psychotic mechanisms of an offence the content of delirious experience should be discovered as well and the place and the role of real persons who might be involved into the pathological delirious plot have to be found. Assessment of the dangerousness of positive psychotic mechanisms without delirious motivation requires to focus on stability on probability of the recurrence of the syndrome that produced this psychopathological mechanism.