In the past two decades, public fear and antipathy toward sexual offenders have led to public registries of their names and addresses, longer prison sentences, consideration of the death penalty, and civil commitment laws that allow potentially lifetime preventive detention after these offenders complete prison sentences. Twenty states and the federal government have enacted such civil commitme...

Physical symptoms are commonly alleged in civil litigation. In some instances these symptoms are originally produced by psychological factors and antedate the alleged injury being claimed as a tort. These cases reflect abnormal illness-affirming behavior. Factitious physical disorders represent a special category of these individuals because they produce their signs and symptoms consciously. Th...

Although psychopathy is recognized as a relatively strong risk factor for violence among inmates and mentally disordered offenders, few studies have examined the extent to which its predictive power generalizes to civil psychiatric samples. Using data on 1,136 patients from the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment project, this study examined whether the 2 scales that underlie the Psychopathy Che...

An epidemiological survey of male and female executive officers in the Civil Service showed a prevalence of 33% of minor psychiatric disorders. Follow up one year later found that only half were better. The presence of minor psychiatric disorder was associated with increased rates of sickness absence, particularly certified absence. Such a high prevalence, associated as it is with handicap to t...

Services for people with learning disabilities have been transformed since the late 1960s have been transformed since the late 1960s by the move from institutional to community by the move from institutional to community care. (Learning disabilities is the term care. (Learning disabilities is the term currently used in the UK in preference to currently used in the UK in preference to mental ret...

practice dating from medieval times) with increasingly concentrated and accurate firepower from rifled musketry and cannon. Thus Napoleon Bonaparte would lose over 40,000 dead and wounded in 2 days at the battle of Wagram (1809) while the murderous engagement at Antietam in the American civil war in September 1862 produced 1-day losses of 25,000 men, which rivaled even the fatalities of the Bri...