Homicide in the context of psychosis: analysis of prior service utilisation and age at onset of illness and violence.

Background: Public stigma and fear are heightened in cases of extreme violence perpetrated by persons with serious mental illness (SMI). Prevention efforts require understanding of illness patterns and treatment needs prior to these events unfolding.

Aims: To examine mental health service utilisation by persons who committed homicide and entered into forensic care, to investigate the adequacy of mental healthcare preceding these offences.

Serious Mental Illness and Sexual Offending in Forensic Psychiatric Patients.

The role of serious mental illness among those who sexually offend is not well understood. We investigated clinical and risk-related areas of difference between male forensic psychiatric patients with ( = 86) and without ( = 245) a sexual offense history, including the age at which indications of mental disorder and criminal offending first emerged, from a registry of Ontario patients adjudicated Not Criminally Responsible on account of Mental Disorder (NCRMD) from 1999-2012. We further explored motivations for offending among a subset of patients deemed NCRMD for a sexual offense specifically ( = 41).

A Review of the Prevalence of Psychosis in Sexual Homicide.

Despite a growing body of research on the association between psychosis and homicide and between psychosis and sexual offending, research on psychosis and sexual homicide is limited. The objective of this review was to estimate the prevalence of psychosis in sexual homicide and to explore the extent to which prior research has investigated symptoms of psychosis as a motivating or causal variable leading to incidents of sexual homicide. We hypothesized that psychosis is present in a minority of sexual homicide cases.