Discrimination against offenders with mental disorder.

Background: Mentally disordered offenders may suffer discrimination on the basis of mental disorder, or on the basis of being offenders, or both.

Aims: The aim of this paper is to outline a framework for examining discrimination affecting mentally disordered offenders. It is argued that there should be systematic comparisons between offenders with mental disorder and nonoffenders with mental disorder in order to identify and characterise specific failures to ensure equivalence of mental health care; and systematic comparisons between offenders with mental disorder and offenders without mental disorder in order to identify how mental disorder may constitute a barrier to forms of support and constructive intervention available to other offenders.

Forensic psychiatry and public protection.

The prominence of risk in UK social and criminal justice policy creates opportunities, challenges and dangers for forensic psychiatry. The future standing of the specialty will depend not only on the practical utility of its responses to those opportunities and challenges, but also the ethical integrity of those responses.

Cross-cultural clinical judgment bias in personality disorder diagnosis by forensic psychiatrists in the UK: a case-vignette study.

Previous research in the UK has suggested that cross-cultural bias in personality disorder diagnosis might partly account for the smaller proportion of Black, relative to White, patients with personality disorder in secure psychiatric hospitals. Using the case-vignette method, we investigated cross-cultural clinical judgment bias in the diagnosis of personality disorder in African Caribbean men by 220 forensic psychiatrists in the UK. In the vignette describing possible DSM-IV antisocial personality disorder, Caucasians were 2.

Forensic psychiatry and political controversy.

This article gives a U.K.-based perspective on the involvement of forensic psychiatry organizations in questions of political controversy.