CHICAGO, Aug. 2 (UPI) -- A Northwestern University study indicates severely mentally ill people are more likely victims rather than perpetrators of violence.
Researchers at the university's Feinberg School of Medicine say more than one-fourth of individuals with severe mental illness were victims of violent crime during 2004 -- a rate nearly 12 times that of the general population.
Depending on the type of violent crime, prevalence was six to 23 times greater among people with severe mental illness than among the general population, said lead author Linda Teplin, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Feinberg.
In addition, Teplin said the annual incidence of violent crime in people with severe mental illness who live in the community is more than four times higher than that in the general population.
Teplin, director of the Psycho-Legal Studies Program at Feinberg, and her colleagues administered the National Crime Victimization Survey to 936 randomly selected patients from 16 outpatient, day or residential mental health agencies in Chicago. They compared results with those of the 32,450 participants in the annual NCVS conducted by the Bureau of the Census.
The research appears in the August issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.
