Commentary: Dangerous patients or dangerous diseases?

摘要

Given something of an international panic about people with a mental disorder, perhaps the most important contribution to rational practice is to emphasise that such disorders account for a minute proportion of society's violence. In countries with modest criminal homicide rates of, say, 2-6 per 100000 population, people with schizophrenia are overrepresented in criminal homicide statistics compared with their representation in the general population. In Denmark there is even some evidence of an increase, since 1959, in the number of men with schizophrenia who kill someone within their family. Criminal homicide, however, is a highly selected type of unnatural death even in peacetime.