Abstract

Alec Buchanan is Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, where he works for the Division of Law and Psychiatry. He received an MPhil in Criminology and a PhD from Cambridge University. His research focuses on assessing the risk of harm to others in psychiatric populations and the role of risk assessment in clinical management in psychiatry.

Psychosocial function, legal involvement and violence in mental disorder

Since the 1970s, researchers on both sides of the Atlantic have used populations surveys to describe the relationships between mental disorders, on the one hand, and violence or trouble with the law, on the other. While the findings have been relatively consistent, the data have not led to significant progress in understanding the mechanisms by which violence and legal trouble occur in mental disorder. The lecture will describe recent research investigating what role impaired psychosocial function plays in these mechanisms, and whether that role varies according to the type of mental disorder from which someone suffers.