Presence of Armed School Officials and Fatal and Nonfatal Gunshot Injuries During Mass School Shootings, United States, 1980-2019.

This cross-sectional study examines whether there is an association between having an armed guard at school and the prevalence of deaths and injuries during school shootings and attempted shootings.

Group Aggression.

Group aggression is an important concern for societies around the world. The field of intergroup relations, a sub-field of social-psychology, offers critical insight into the emergence of group conflict and aggression. This review examines the most influential theoretical frameworks from the field of intergroup relations, namely realistic conflict theory, relative deprivation theory, social identity theory, social dominance theory, and deindividuation theory.

Developing an Understanding of Victims and Violent Offenders: The Impact of Fostering Empathy.

This study explores the consequences of fostering empathy-for both victims and perpetrators-after large-scale violent events. Participants ( N = 834) read a description of a school shooting and were randomly assigned to one of six conditions revealing varying amounts of background information about the victim and the perpetrator of violence. The impact of empathy on reactions toward the victim and perpetrator were then assessed.

How often and how consistently do symptoms directly precede criminal behavior among offenders with mental illness?

Although offenders with mental illness are overrepresented in the criminal justice system, psychiatric symptoms relate weakly to criminal behavior at the group level. In this study of 143 offenders with mental illness, we use data from intensive interviews and record reviews to examine how often and how consistently symptoms lead directly to criminal behavior. First, crimes rarely were directly motivated by symptoms, particularly when the definition of symptoms excluded externalizing features that are not unique to Axis I illness.

Supervision practices in specialty mental health probation: What happens in officer-probationer meetings?

As the correctional population continues to increase, probation agencies struggle to adequately supervise offenders with unique needs, including those with mental disorder. Although more than 100 U.S.

If you want to know, consider asking: how likely is it that patients will hurt themselves in the future?

Although self-harming behavior is a common and costly problem for psychiatric inpatients released from the hospital, standardized tools that assess patients' risk for self-harm are rarely used in clinical settings. In this study of dually diagnosed psychiatric inpatients (N = 147), we assessed the utility of patients' self-perceptions of risk in predicting self-harm in the community. Patients' self-perceptions of risk predicted self-harm 8 weeks after discharge from the hospital (Lag 1; area under the curve [AUC] = 0.

Analyzing offense patterns as a function of mental illness to test the criminalization hypothesis.

Objective: Programs for offenders with mental illness seem to be based on a hypothesis that untreated symptoms are the main source of criminal behavior and that linkage with psychiatric services is the solution. This study tested this criminalization hypothesis, which implies that these individuals have unique patterns of offending.

Methods: Participants were 220 parolees; 111 had a serious mental illness, and 109 did not.

Correctional policy for offenders with mental illness: creating a new paradigm for recidivism reduction.

Offenders with mental illness have attracted substantial attention over the recent years, given their prevalence and poor outcomes. A number of interventions have been developed for this population (e.g.

D-cycloserine augmented exposure therapy for obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Background: D-cycloserine (DCS), a glutamatergic partial N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) agonist, can facilitate extinction learning related to cued fear in animals and humans. We predicted that DCS would accelerate obsession-related distress reduction in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) undergoing extinction-based exposure therapy.

Methods: We administered DCS (125 mg) or placebo in a double-blind fashion to individuals with OCD approximately 2 hours before each exposure session.