Who should take responsibility for antisocial personality disorder?

摘要

The diagnostic boundaries and treatability of personality disorders have always been medically controversial. Whether offenders with antisocial or dissocial personality disorder—"a most elusive category [with] wavering confines"—should be treated in hospital or punished in prison is profoundly controversial. Now, because of highly publicised cases of paedophilic violent offenders released from prison and, the case of Michael Stone, a convicted psychopathic murderer, the medical response to personality disorder has become a subject of national political debate. The dispute between the home secretary and the president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists about whether psychiatrists should be preventively detaining untreatable psychopaths under the Mental Health Act illustrates well the field of political conflict.