Faculty Bibliography

This study relates violent behavior of schizophrenic inpatients to demographic, historical, EEG, neurological, and neuropsychological variables. Patients were classified into high (N = 28), low (N = 27), or no (N = 34) violence groups. There were no significant differences among the groups on demographic or historical variables, except for prevalence of violent crime, which was higher in both violent groups than in nonviolent patients. Neurological and neuropsychological abnormalities differentiated the groups, with the high violence group evidencing more abnormalities than the other two groups in the area of integrative sensory and motor functions. The authors suggest that violence as well as neurological and neuropsychological deficits may characterize a more severe form of schizophrenia

This study compared patients who showed persistent violence, transient violence and no violence. The presence of neurological abnormalities was found to be the factor that differentiated most clearly among the three groups. The persistently violent patients, in addition to showing significantly more neurological abnormalities, also evidenced a more disturbed family background. Both violent groups had a higher incidence of violent crime prior to hospitalization than the nonviolent controls. A logistic regression model simultaneously relating the effects of six factors on violent behavior was developed and used to predict violent group membership

The authors followed prospectively a group of 79 newly admitted male schizophrenics for 6 months or until discharged, whichever came first, and monitored their assaultive behavior by review of their charts and the ward journals. Assaults were detected reliably by this method. When the assaultive behavior monitored in this way was contrasted with officially reported assaultiveness, 50% more assaults and 34.5% more patients who had one or more instances of assaultive behavior during the study period were detected. There were no differences in the number of injuries detected by the two methods. The authors contend that a realistic estimate of the incidence of physical assaults in young male schizophrenic inpatients is no less than 1.5 times that reflected by official reports

Inpatient assaults were videotaped and then characterized by tape reviewers as showing high or low hostility. Over a 2-month period, the videotape reviewers documented more than twice as many high-hostility assaults as were documented by other methods of reporting

A sample of 87 psychiatric inpatients known to have been assaultive while in the hospital was contrasted with a matched group of nonviolent patients to identify the personal risk factors that distinguished the two groups. Data were collected using a personal history interview, a neurological examination, and an electroencephalogram. The four risk factors identified--neurological abnormality, history of violent crime, history of violent suicide attempts, and deviant family environment in childhood--were used to develop a statistical model predicting which subjects in a sample of newly admitted patients would become assaultive during the first three months after admission. The predicted classification of patients was found to be significantly related to subsequent assaultive behavior