Mental Health Homicide And Society

A homicide committed by a mentally disordered person who is under the care of health service professionals is a shocking event. Otherwise known as a 'patient homicide', these incidents are followed by an investigation into the care and treatment received by the perpetrator. These investigations are often regarded as a way to 'learn lessons', establish accountability and provide catharsis to families and the public. The book argues however that patient homicide events and the circumstances in which they occur are communicated about within closed systems of life (eg law, medicine). These systems operate according to unique internal logics. The communications produced by these systems, nevertheless, resonate in society and enable a diverse and complex space of governance to emerge – a space of governance in which universal understandings about patient homicides, health care, public safety and risk are unachievable. The Scottish Government initiated reform of their patient homicide investigation procedures in 2017 and plans to reform patient homicide investigations in England are slowly germinating. This original and compelling book is therefore a timely and important contribution. It concludes that health policy makers should re-evaluate their normative commitments to patient homicide risk reduction in a world of disharmony, objection and resistance.

A homicide committed by a mentally disordered person who is under the care of health service professionals is a shocking event. Otherwise known as a 'patient homicide', these incidents are followed by an investigation into the care and treatment received by the perpetrator. These investigations are often regarded as a way to 'learn lessons', establish accountability and provide catharsis to families and the public. The book argues however that patient homicide events and the circumstances in which they occur are communicated about within closed systems of life (eg law, medicine). These systems operate according to unique internal logics. The communications produced by these systems, nevertheless, resonate in society and enable a diverse and complex space of governance to emerge - a space of governance in which universal understandings about patient homicides, health care, public safety and risk are unachievable.

Human psychological and physical well-being is damaged and destroyed when people are deliberately killed by other people. There are millions of primary and secondary victims of murder throughout the world, and human society as a whole is a tertiary victim of murder. Despite this, people are often fascinated and engrossed by stories of homicide and killers. This book provides a fascinating exploration of murder, providing an insight into what leads people to kill and what effect this has on society as a whole. This book is organized into five chapters that each answer a specific question on murder: What is Murder? Who Commits Murder? Why Commit Murder? Why is Murder Devastating? Why is Murder Fascinating?

This book critiques the connection between Western society and madness, scrutinizing if and how societal insanity affects the cause, construction, and consequence of madness. Looking beyond the affected individual to their social, political, economic, ecological, and cultural context, this book examines whether society itself, and its institutions, divisions, practices, and values, is mad. That society’s insanity is relevant to the sanity and insanity of its citizens has been argued by Fromm in The Sane Society, but also by a host of sociologists, social thinkers, epidemiologists and biologists. This book builds on classic texts such as Foucault’s History of Madness, Scull’s Marxist-oriented works and more recent publications which have arisen from a range of socio-political and patient-orientated movements. Chapters in this book draw on biology, psychology, sociological and anthropological thinking that argues that where madness is concerned, society matters. Providing an extended case study of how the sociological imagination should operate in a contemporary setting, this book draws on genetics, neuroscience, cognitive science, radical psychology, and evolutionary psychology/psychiatry. It is an important read for students and scholars of sociology, anthropology, social policy, criminology, health, and mental health.

Jonathan Foiles weaves together psychology and public policy, exploring the trauma underlying urbanization in a book Kirkus Reviews calls an "urgent call for reform." When Jonathan Foiles was a graduate studen

Most professional books on the subject of homicide convey a criminological or legal standpoint. Homicide: A Psychiatric Perspective complements those approaches by offering a clinical understanding unique in the literature, considering not merely the crime but the broad spectrum of homicidal behavior. Combining psychiatric knowledge of that behavior with actual case material, this work provides a single-expert point of view, synthesizing current literature while maintaining a focused perspective that not only reviews the macroscopic findings of descriptive nosology but also places the individual murderer under the microscope. This new edition considers aspects of homicidal behavior in American society that were not prominent a decade ago, as evidenced by such phenomena as the Columbine killings and public fascination with The Sopranos. Dr. Malmquist draws on his extensive background in forensic psychiatry and consultancy experience in hundreds of murder cases, blending medical, biological, psychological, and social factors to forge a psychiatric understanding of homicide in the twenty-first century. He provides insight into such key concerns as epidemiology, the ongoing difficulty of predicting homicidal behavior in psychotic individuals, and the contrasting viewpoints of psychiatry and the legal system; and he describes how various clinical psychiatric conditions such as narcissism and depression have their own special vulnerabilities for homicidal violence. The book uses DSM-IV-TR as a diagnostic framework and adds a psychodynamic component for appropriate cases, offering a broad overview of homicide today: Cases are drawn from evaluated homicidal individuals, not simply generic examples, and reflect homicides that involve a legal conviction, a confession, or clinical material beyond media reportage. New to this edition are insights into recent homicide trends such as sexual and serial murders, school killings, homicide among preadolescents, stalking, murder by health care personnel, and close-combat killings in the military. Statistical data on epidemiology have been updated, recent cases have been added, and the latest legal decisions are discussed -- all making this book as timely as it is authoritative. Homicide: A Psychiatric Perspective is an essential reference for mental health professionals as well as attorneys, correctional officers, or social workers engaged in criminal law. With its keys to evaluating patients or defendants who have engaged in serious acts of violence, it offers unprecedented clinical insights into the homicidal mind.

This book offers a unique framework for examining the various types of family murder -- delving into the commonalities, the differences, and society's misconceptions and providing readers with a comprehensive guide to begin to understand these tragedies.

Murder is the most malevolent of acts by humans. Not only does the slaying of a man, woman or child destroy a life, but it ravages the lives of all those associated with the person who has been killed, and foments the collective angst of the community. But the mad who kill are placed in a different socio-legal category to that of ?normal' murderers. Those regarded as insane, either at the time of their improbity or after the event, are propelled into a distinct and discreditable stratum of deviancy. They are 'unreasonably' dangerous. These miscreants are construed as 'double-trouble' - mad and bad! Is there justifiable (if exaggerated) anxiety about dangerous mentally disordered people being 'loose' in the community? Is there a genuine need to protect both society at large and the mad? Does public concern about the homicidal tendencies of the mentally disordered warrant emphatic social intervention to protect both potential victims and perpetrators? What are the merits and consequences of post-liberal mental health policies and laws, introduced at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century in response to a declared failure of previous approaches to the care of mentally disordered people and the protection of the public? How have the psychiatric disciplines of medicine and nursing contributed to a period of unprecedented public alarm in the 1990s about the mentally disordered?