La responsabilité pénale du malade psychotique ou bipolaire en intercrise

Abstract

The issue of the criminal responsibility of psychotic or bipolar patients behaving antisocially during a lucid interval of their pathology does not seem to have received attention in the modern psychiatric and forensic literature. On the other hand, lawyers in Latin antiquity, canon law, former French law and the alienists of the xix and xxth centuries were interested in this issue and envisaged solutions. Contemporary scientific research has shown that periods of intercrise in psychotic and bipolar disorders are not euthymic and that they often persist between the active phases of various residual symptoms, thereby altering the psychosocial functioning of patients and attenuating their criminal responsibility. This study offers psychiatric experts a clinical framework for understanding the period of intercrise, the mental disorder involved and the criminal act in order to help them to determine as precisely as possible the degree of responsibility of criminal who perpetrate act during a period of remission of his disorder.