Gender and Malingering in Defendants Deemed Incompetent to Stand Trial.

Abstract

The relationships between gender and malingering have received little attention in the literature. Our study examined data from 1,748 patients committed as incompetent to stand trial between 2008 and 2017, of whom 397 were women. Scores on a structured assessment of feigned psychiatric symptoms were only slightly higher for men than for women. Yet evaluators believed that over 23 percent of men but less than 15 percent of women were malingering. Our data suggest that these gender differences in rates of malingering may be attributable to symptom constellations and extent of criminal arrest history.