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Diagnosing mental disorders in offenders: conceptual and methodological issues
Author(s) -
Corrado Raymond R.,
Cohen Irwin M.,
Hart Stephen D.,
Roesch Ronald
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
criminal behaviour and mental health
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.63
H-Index - 54
eISSN - 1471-2857
pISSN - 0957-9664
DOI - 10.1002/cbm.341
Subject(s) - mental health , psychiatry , medical diagnosis , psychology , classification of mental disorders , clinical psychology , brief psychiatric rating scale , prevalence of mental disorders , medicine , psychosis , pathology
Background Studies of mentally disordered offenders have defined and measured mental disorder in very different ways. We evaluated the agreement among six different definitions of mental disorder: narrow versus broad definitions based on measures of psychiatric symptoms (the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale; Overall and Gorham, 1962), syndromes (the Diagnostic Profile; Hart & Hemphill, 1989), and disorders (lifetime diagnoses on the Diagnostic Interview Schedule, Version III‐A; Robins and Helzer, 1985). Methods Participants were 192 adult men remanded in custody before jail. Each was administered the DIS, the BPRS, and the DP. A number of variables related to adjustment problems in the jail, other mental health issues, and any institutional treatment or any pharmacological treatment for mental health problems were also recorded and analysed. Results The agreement between the symptom‐ and syndrome‐based definitions was moderate, especially for the narrow definitions; furthermore, they yielded similar estimates of prevalence and had similar patterns of associations variables related to institutional security and mental health problems. The disorder‐based definitions, especially the broad, had low agreement with the other definitions, yielded higher prevalence rates, and were associated only weakly with institutional security and mental health problems. Discussion These findings highlight the need to pay greater attention to definitional issues in research on mental disordered offenders, and support the usefulness of definitions based on active psychiatric symptoms associated with major mental illnesses. Copyright © 2000 Whurr Publishers Ltd.