Stockholm 2011

The intriguing question of how mental disorder and violence relate to each other has become an epic academic debate. During the last decades, there has been a change in direction of the debate on individuals with mental disorder, with a greater focus on violent victimization than violent behaviour towards others. Up until now, no Swedish study has investigated the frequency of violent behaviour among general psychiatric patients undergoing psychiatric treatment. Moreover, no Swedish study so far has investigated the relative risk of victimization in general psychiatric patients, in comparison to the general population. The aim of this dissertation was to investigate these issues and to validate the risk assessment method Classification of Violence Risk (COVR)™. Method: In study I, general psychiatric patients were recruited from two public psychiatric hospitals in Stockholm County (n=390). The control group consisted of gender- and age-matched subjects recruited from an annual national survey of living conditions, (conducted by Statistics Sweden) (n=1170)