Forensic Science International Mind and Law最新文献

Children defined as ‘neurodivergent’ are over-represented in the English and Welsh criminal justice system, and face a number of challenges as they navigate their way through the education and youth justice systems. This paper will empirically examine this neglected area of criminal justice involvement in young lives, and involves an interpretivist investigation of neurodivergent children's experiences of the education and youth justice systems, involving semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of 19 children in England who were either in custody or had recently been released from custody. Data were analysed using thematic content analysis.

The research findings suggest that both the education and youth justice systems in England and Wales are disabling and criminalising through processes that, often unintentionally; label, stigmatise, isolate, neglect and harm neurodivergent children. Consideration will turn, in the concluding section of the paper, to what a ‘child first’ education and youth justice system would look like for neurodivergent children.

Forensic Mental Health in Bangladesh is an unattended domain of mental health services. With about 17% of the population suffering from mental disorders per year and more than 80 thousand prisoners in the country, there have not been any studies to look into forensic mental health situations. This research has given an overview of the health and legal systems through qualitative research focusing on a desk review and key informant interviews. Findings show that though there are guidelines in the law and regulatory codes in the judicial systems, implementing those guidelines is not seen in many cases. There are several areas in the health system in terms of capacity, service and resources which needs to be addressed by the government for supporting the healthcare providers, lawyers, judges and mentally ill or disabled people. Our study also portrayed the current referral mechanisms connecting both legal and health systems while addressing different cases of forensic mental health. Finally, discussing the implications of the findings, we presented recommendations from our study and other literature.

Psychological autopsy (PA) has been developed across many countries and contexts has proven beneficial during death investigations and in suicide cases. However, academics and practitioners in Indonesia doubt its reliability and efficacy in post-mortem examinations. Consequently, this piece discusses relevant literature, including empirical studies, reviews, and observations, to help contribute to the debate on the validity and feasibility of incorporating PAs in the Indonesian forensic field. In the authors' view, by adapting PA, which has been implemented in other regions, and adjusting it to relevant socio-cultural contexts, it may be considered a helpful procedure for forensic examination under the legal regulations and social frameworks of Indonesia.

Head injury is prevalent in prisoners and is associated with offending behaviour. Awareness and assessment of the occurrence and effects of recent head injury is important and should occur at an early stage in the criminal justice system. This study looks at knowledge about detainees with a recent head injury in police custody and considers the implications for training of custody officers.

Questionnaires about perceived training needs and knowledge about head injury were completed by 67 custody officers in Scotland. All officers reported a need for further training about head injury and the most common areas of need were perceived to be assessment, early management and long term effects. Knowledge and past training seemed to be more focussed on awareness of potentially catastrophic brain injury and a limited understanding of impairment of insight and of emotional and behavioural effects was evident.

There is a need for routine training about recent effects of head injury for custody officers to include the effects on insight, emotional and behavioural effects in detainees in addition to training on catastrophic outcomes which tends to be the main focus of current practice.

Previous findings suggest that the mass media depictions of people with mental disorders emphasize violence and criminality, unpredictable behaviour, and social incompetence. Our overall objective was to draw a general portrait of subcultural representations of criminal and violent behavior in the context of psychiatry. The content analysis of 190 song lyrics from a sample of 7777 outlined the elements composing the depictions of crime and violence and their connections with mental disorders in Spanish punk music (1981–2010). Two approaches were identified: one group of songs emphasized descriptions of violent and criminal behavior, while the other focused on psychiatric symptoms, syndromes, or diagnoses (appearing the violent or criminal behavior as epiphenomena of mental health problems). Quantitatively, songs with themes alluding to homicidal behavior predominated, with multiple homicide being widely portrayed. Regarding psychiatric disorders, substance use prevailed and, to a lesser extent, antisocial personality traits and psychotic symptoms. The depictions found are closely related to the connotations expected in the general population. Thus, we found a predilection for violent crimes and frequent allusions to the perpetrator as ‘mentally disturbed.’ It is consistent with the greater frequency of descriptions of violent crime in the media, despite its relative infrequency to other types of crime. Likewise, it coincides with the cultural interest in homicide and how it nourishes the current entertainment industry. However, some distinctive features in punk music included positive connotations for social deviance, and even antisocial traits, as a form of identity affirmation and opposition to the social order. On the other hand, violence and crime serve fundamentally punk provocativeness rather than a mythification or aesthetic enjoyment of crime. The portrayal of crime in the punk narratives was constructed around different non-exclusive sources whose contribution varied between compositions. It included the contents learned from and transmitted through the mass media, mainly the press, films, and television. These media provide both factual and fictional content (intertextuality). Other artistic manifestations can equally contribute to the interdiscursive ambit. The influence of crime news from abroad was relevant in depictions of mass murder (particularly, mass shootings), the same as intertextuality (mainly based on non-Spanish productions) for the subcultural portrayals of serial killers. Generally, the medical and criminological sciences have limited influence on the opinions of the general population, which continue to rely mostly on biased reports from mass media. This is a pending task for the scientific, academic, and clinical fields, hence the relevance of a dialogue between art, culture, media, and psychiatry.

Methodically sound psychiatric diagnoses are necessary quality-assuring elements in forensic psychiatry, but on their own they are not sufficient to answer the questions posed for an expert assessment. This position will be developed here in the context of a historical outline of key ideas in forensic psychiatry, a reflection on nosology and diagnosis in psychiatry, and the argument that psychopathology needs to be accorded greater influence. Regarding psychiatric assessments, the reference back to the experiential history of clinical psychiatry in dealing with all forms and degrees of mental disorder (the “psychopathological reference system”) does not represent a backward-looking traditionalism, nor is it adversarial to current neuroscientific or socioscientific research. On the contrary, such an historical anchoring, which specifically and methodically incorporates the internationally established diagnostic manuals ICD-10, DSM-5 and (from 2022) ICD-11, will enhance the quality of diagnosis, therapy and research. Especially, but not only in forensic psychiatric work, the following applies: The hasty replacement of operationally defined diagnoses by possibly plausible but “isolated” individual findings that are not sufficiently embedded in an overall scientific context can lead to an overvaluation of these findings and to the loss of substantial psychopathological knowledge. These risks must be avoided, because psychiatry will continue to depend on psychopathology in each of its fields of activity.