Tattooing and Different Personalities; a Comparison Study of Turkish Criminals and Control Sample

Abstract

Objective The relationship of tattoos to the diagnosis of personality disorders was explored in a forensic psychiatric inpaitent hospital setting. It was hypothesized that a greater proportion of forensic inpaitents possessing tattoos had higher criminality and had personality disorders in compairison to the people with tattoos without criminal history. In this study we compared also the important sociodemographic caharctersitics of criminals with tattoos and the normal population with tattoos without criminality. Method Forensic male and female psychiatric paitents (N=42) were administered a semi-structured interview to determine the presence of tattoo. Personality disorder was determined after clinical psychiatric examination by 5 different spychiatrists and aditionally personality disorders criteria acording to DSM-5 were cehcked out. The same semi-structured interview was appilied on th control group withou personality disorder evaluation. Results Paitents with tattoos had a significantly less number of tattoos but tattoos on different areas of their body, and were more likely to have histories of substance abuse, sexual-abuse, unhappy childhood, enduring violence, taruamtic life-experiences, and suicidal attempts than non-criminals. Conclusion This is the first study of which compares the forensic psychiatric paitents with normal controls in means of tattoos, personality disorders and other demographic charactersitics performed in Turkey. We concluded that there is an interaction between criminality and tattoos but the reverse is not always true at least in our control sample.