Fear of the (almost) unknown

Abstract

In this issue of the journal, Sturup and Lindqvist help fill the void of data on the factors associated with serious recidivism, with their report on violent recidivism in a cohort of 174 people convicted of homicide in Sweden during the decade 1971–1980 (Sturup and Lindqvist, 2014). Twenty-two (13%) of these offenders had a psychotic illness and five (3%) had committed a previous homicide. One hundred and fifty-three were followed after the index homicide for an average of over 21 years, during which time 15 committed further serious offences, including five homicides. Only one of the recidivist homicide offenders had a diagnosed psychotic illness; the remaining nine members of the cohort who had committed earlier or later homicides had been diagnosed with personality disorder. However, five of the 15 serious recidivists suffered from psychosis, which was the only clinical factor that was significantly associated with repeat offending. In a previous issue of the journal we reported a 30-year retrospective study of homicide offenders with schizophrenia from the Chuvash Republic of the Russian Federation between 1981 and 2010 (Golenkov et al., 2013). We found that 16 (11%) of the 149 homicide offenders with schizophrenia had committed a previous homicide. We found some possible risk factors – living in a rural area and dissocial personality traits – but a limitation of the study was that we were not able to examine whether homicide offenders with schizophrenia were more likely to commit a second homicide than other homicide offenders. It is widely believed that schizophrenia is a risk factor for homicide recidivism. Although this may well be true, the assumption is largely on the basis of the findings of a single study from Finland with a small number of cases. The Finnish study found that four of the 93 (4%) homicide offenders with a diagnosis of