Mortality among mentally disordered offenders: a community based follow-up study

✍ Scribed by Tabita Björk; Dr Per Lindqvist

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2005
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 67 KB
• Volume: 15
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0957-9664
• DOI: 10.1002/cbm.41

✦ Synopsis

Background:

Follow-up information about outcome for hospitalized mentally disordered offenders (mdo) is necessary for evaluation and improvement in quality of forensic psychiatric care.

Aim:

A study was undertaken to estimate the standard mortality rate (smr) of a population based sample of people sentenced to forensic psychiatric care.

Method:

All mdos in orebro county, sweden, discharged from a forensic psychiatric treatment unit between 1992 and 1999 were identified (n = 46). the variables were gender, age, offence, diagnosis and duration of admission. case linkage was made with the national cause-of-death register. median follow-up time was 53 months (0-93).

Results:

The sample yielded a significantly elevated smr 13.4 (95% ci 4.35-31.3) times higher than that in the general population, mostly due to suicide.

Conclusions:

The cohort size is small but representative, and it provides data from an additional country for the growing international pool confirming the high risk of premature, generally self-inflicted death among mdos. resettlement and rehabilitation services for them may need to take as much account of mortality risk as that of re-offending.