SCHIZOPHRENIAtheir childhood history. Among the sixteen people who reported having
had one or more non-distressing psychotic experiences since the
first interview, just one had been traumatized as a child. In contrast,
among the 21 people who reported having had one or more distressing
psychotic experiences, nine had experienced a childhood trauma. The
people who said they’d been traumatized also tended to report having
less control over their psychotic experiences.
Schizophrenia and violence
You’ve probably seen a headline “Paranoid Schizophrenic Stabs Stranger at
Bus-stop” or something similar. An unfortunate consequence of journal-
ists’ love of these kinds of stories is that they give a distorted impression
of the links between psychosis and violence. In fact, the overwhelming
majority of murders and violent acts are committed by people who are
not psychotic or mentally ill. There’s also evidence that murders by people
with a serious mental illness have fallen since the 1970s (to around twenty
per year in the UK), while murders in general have increased.
A 2009 study, led by psychologist Martin Grann at Stockholm
University, goes further. Grann and his colleagues analysed Swedish
crime records and found that among people with schizophrenia but
without a related alcohol problem, rates of violent crime were no higher
than among the general population. The study’s lead author Niklas
Langstrom concluded: “...the idea that people with schizophrenia are
generally more violent than those without is not true”.
Of course, these kinds of statistics and claims are of little consolation
to the relatives of people attacked by a person with a serious mental
illness, especially if there’s reason to believe that the attack wouldn’t
have happened had the patient been on medication. Relevant to this
argument is an analysis of international crime data by Matthew Large,
an independent clinician, and Olav Nielssen of St Vincent’s Hospital in
Sydney. Their data-crunching suggested that the risk of murder by a
person experiencing a first episode of psychosis is twenty times higher
before treatment than afterwards. Large believes that psychotic patients
receiving treatment are barely more dangerous than the average healthy
person, but he said that untreated first-episode psychosis is “a singularly
dangerous condition”.
Research, such as that conducted by Large and Nielssen, has led to calls
for laws to be introduced to compel people with a diagnosis of schizo-
phrenia to take anti-psychotic medication. However, many other experts