Background
Studies
of the overlap between severe mental disorder and criminality tend to focus on
prison populations rather than psychiatric populations.
Aims
Our aims
were to establish the prevalence of previous imprisonment among female
psychiatric inpatients and test relationships between diagnoses, mortality and
imprisonment.
Methods
A
nationwide cohort of 18–65-year-old women who had been hospitalised for
psychiatric disorder between January 1983 and March 2008 was identified from a
hospital records database and linked to the database of the Prison and
Probation Administration of Iceland as well as the National Register of causes
of death at Statistics Iceland from January 1985.
Results
Six
thousand and ninety-four women had had at least one psychiatric
hospitalisation, 102 of them had been imprisoned on 172 occasions between them,
giving an imprisonment rate of 118 per 100,000 over the 24 year period of
study. The crude imprisonment proportion was 1.7% during a 20-year follow-up
period; it was at its peak (5%) among 18–30 year-olds at index admission.
Substance use and personality disorders were the most common diagnoses
associated with imprisonment. Mortality rates were not statistically different
between those imprisoned and not.
Conclusion and implications for practice
Women
admitted to a psychiatric hospital have higher rates of imprisonment than the
general population. Because admission predated imprisonment in most cases, this
may be seen as an opportunity for early intervention to reduce later
criminality.
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