Psychosis and forensic relevance | forensic-evaluations

Psychotic disorders are characterized by severe diaturbance in cognition, emotion, perception and volition that result in severe psychosocial dysfunction and inability to meet daily life needs and impaired reality testing.

Psychosis and forensic relevance

According to law, an Individual's ability to make decisions requires that individual accurately perceives the environment, rationally manipulate the information about environment, ability to communicate desires and intentions. These decision making capacity is impaired in the individuals with psychotic disorders( especially those having positive symptoms). Because of this, psychotic disorders are particularly important in psychological evaluations of adjudicative competencies (e.g., stand trial, right to counsel, confess) and culpability in criminal settings and evaluations of other competencies (e.g., consent to treatment, testify, make wills, sign contracts) in civil settings.

Psychotic symptoms are directly linked with violence. For example, a person with persecutory delusions may assault someone whom he thinks is trying to poison him. Psychotic disorders increase the risk of violence 2 times more as indicated by research.

Therefore, it is important to assess the individual properly so the proper justice can be ensured.

4 Comments

Anne

Feb 06, 2022

Thank you so much for sharing this. Can you tell me which psychotic symptoms are the most significant for violence? You mentioned persecutory delusions, so is this the main concern?

Sehrish I.

Replying to

@Anne not just persecutory delusions but many different kind of delusions (like jealous type) also there are hallucinations mostly the auditory ones (where person says someone has guided them to do this, they hear some voices). There are many associated features along with psychosis like aggression, Impulsivity or if they are having any comorbid condition like substance abuse. Hope this is helpful.