Homicide-suicide represents a single episode of violence which may decimate an entire family. This study aimed to further describe motives and context of these tragedies. Psychological autopsies were completed for 18 homicide-suicide cases in Dallas, Texas. This included postevent interviews with surviving family members and review of police and coroner records. Two-thirds of perpetrators had made either verbal or written threats prior to the homicide-suicide. A simplified typology describing victim-perpetrator relationship and motive type is suggested for future studies and clinical ease. Two-thirds of perpetrators fell into the category of Intimate-Possessive, most of whom were depressed men who were abusing substances and undergoing separation. Additional categories included Intimate-Ailing, Filial-Revenge, Familial-Psychotic, and Friend-Psychotic. Further, implications from this psychological autopsy study regarding risk assessment include use of collateral interviews regarding threats and past violence.

Educator sexual misconduct has received increasing attention over the past decade. The attention has exposed a number of concerning issues, including a lack of formal research in the area and difficulties in recognizing and prosecuting cases. Public responses to high profile cases of sexual misconduct involving female teachers suggest that gender-biased views on sex offenders remain prominent in society. This article will review the literature on female teacher sexual misconduct in addition to what is known about grooming patterns and warning signs. Finally, current dilemmas in resolving cases of educator sexual misconduct will be discussed, and basic prevention strategies will be recommended.

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Identification is one of eight warning behaviors--superordinate patterns of accelerating risk--that are theorized to correlate with targeted violence, and have some empirical validation. It is characterized by one or more of five characteristics: pseudo-commando behavior, evidence of a warrior mentality, a close association with weapons or other military or law enforcement paraphernalia, wanting to imitate and often surmount previous attackers or assassins, or believing oneself to be an agent to advance a particular cause or belief system. The authors briefly explore the history of the psychology of identification, its current usage, and its application to threat assessment. Four cases are used to illustrate identification as both a process and a product, and a likely motive for targeted violence in some subjects. Its operational relevance for threat assessment is suggested.

Whereas etiological heterogeneity of the various types of schizophrenia has been repeatedly proposed, relatively few attempts have been made to separate the component diseases. Using a strategy focusing on bimodal distributions within several relevant domains of schizophrenia, we demonstrate that currently available data on schizophrenia patients are consistent with the hypothesis that some of these patients have an ongoing neurodegenerative disease, whereas others do not. We review studies (longitudinal and cross-sectional) documenting progressive increases in ventricular size, accelerated loss of brain tissues, progressive delays in treatment response, and neurochemical (magnetic resonance spectroscopy) and neurophysiological (P300) indices, all of which are consistent with ongoing cerebral degeneration in a significant subgroup of schizophrenia patients. These lines of evidence converge on a conceptualization of schizophrenia as being composed of several etiologically distinct processes, with one subset of psychotic patients evidencing progressive brain degeneration. We conclude with a discussion of possible etiologies for this condition.

School shooters present a challenge to both forensic psychiatry and law enforcement agencies. The relatively small number of school shooters, their various characteristics, and the lack of in-depth analysis of all of the shooters prior to the shooting add complexity to our understanding of this problem. In this short paper, we introduce a new methodology for automatically profiling school shooters. The methodology involves automatic analysis of texts and the production of several measures relevant for the identification of the shooters. Comparing texts written by 6 school shooters to 6056 texts written by a comparison group of male subjects, we found that the shooters’ texts scored significantly higher on the Narcissistic Personality dimension as well as on the Humilated and Revengeful dimensions. Using a ranking/prioritization procedure, similar to the one used for the automatic identification of sexual predators, we provide support for the validity and relevance of the proposed methodology.

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This article traces the history of the way in which mental disorders were viewed and treated, from before the birth of Christ to the present day. Special attention is paid to the process of deinstitutionalization in the United States and the failure to create an adequately robust community mental health system to care for the people who, in a previous era, might have experienced lifelong hospitalization. As a result, far too many people with serious mental illnesses are living in jails and prisons that are ill-suited and unprepared to meet their needs.