Citation

Sen P, Kumari V. Front. Psychiatry 2024; 15: e1359586.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2024, Frontiers Media)

DOI

10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1359586

PMID

38313689

PMCID

PMC10834700

Abstract

Forensic mental health services are tasked with predicting the risk of future violence for patients, to perform the very important societal function of keeping the public safe. The largest proportion of patients within forensic mental health services suffer from psychosis. Thus, it is crucially important that there are objective and measurable predictors of violence risk for this group. Forensic mental health services tend to be the most expensive services within health systems with the longest lengths of stay. Objective or numerical parameters of risk would help to introduce greater consistency into the risk assessment process, which would not only contribute to better public safety and reduce the risk of reputational damage to the service, but also help forensic clinicians to better defend their practice. This Research Topic thus focused on the objective and measurable predictors of violence risk with potential for translation into the clinical practice of risk assessment in forensic psychiatry. On this topic, we highlight four excellent studies as follows.

First, Guo et al. presented a systematic review and meta-analysis of the prevalence of different types of violence toward others among people with schizophrenia in China and their influencing factors. They categorized violence-to-others into four types: (i) the reviews of official criminal or psychiatric records, (ii) less serious forms of violence, (iii) acts which caused demonstrable harm to victims, and (iv) homicide. The findings showed a different prevalence for these violence types, with almost 1 in 4 from reviews of official records and less serious forms of violence. The findings also demonstrated how regional factors like being inland compared to coastal areas or being inpatients were important for predicting violence in China, although this was complicated by the fact that there were better detection rates of violence in areas with high levels of violence, thus contributing to better prevalence estimates. Age (< 40 years) was another predictor of violence. The authors, justifiably, concluded that prediction of violence in psychosis was complex as it depended on multiple factors which would need to be combined to improve accuracy of violence prediction.

The second study by Lin et al. in our series was also from China. This study provided promising evidence for an ...

Language: en

Keywords

EEG; forensic - psychiatric practice; mental health; schizophraenia; violence