Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1934. / Without thesis note. Includes bibliographical references.

1 Summary The presented thesis deals with mental disorders and their meaning in criminal law in general, not only from the law point of view, but even from the point of view of the psychiatry. It also deals with the insanity emphasized the biological criterion of insanity. It discusses in detail the legislation of the Czech republic and also the legislation in global. The definition of insanity doesn't exist in legislative, but the judicature and law theory work with the concept of two criterions of insanity - the biological and the juristic. The biological criterion of insanity means the mental disorder. Professionals use the International classification of diseases MKN - 10th revision as the correct explanation of the mental disorders. This classification system is neccessary for the determination of the right diagnosis. The classification consist of the scale from F0 to F99. There are groups of specific mental disorders like mental, behavioural and mood disorders (affective disorders) etc. The forensic importance of some mental disorders is higher than the others, therefore I mention only the some of them. In the description of the specific mental disorder are also used real cases. To determine the sanity of the offenders are used the certificated experts. Education, research, preventive treatment and...

The prevalence and consequences of the insanity plea, titled "guilty except for insanity" in the State of Oregon, are fraught with misconceptions. The use of the plea requires a complex set of interactions between the mental health and criminal justice systems, and comes with severe costs for people who use it. Most of the research on the psychological aspects of the insanity plea emphasizes empirical validity in the form of risk assessment instruments and/or the biomedical model with its focus on disease and illness. This thesis analyzes from community psychology and critical theory perspectives the decision process of hearings held by the Psychiatric Security Review Board. The critical analysis draws specifically on Michel Foucault's (1977) theory of knowledge and power to address three questions: 1. Are there identifiable prototypical narratives of risk that are constructed around evidence admitted to a hearing? 2a. Are these risk narratives deployed differently in public PSRB hearing as opposed to an individual interview? 2b. Do the District Attorney, Defense Attorney, and clinician deploy risk narratives differently? 3. As professionals that create, administer, and interpret risk assessment instruments, how do clinicians use these risk narratives to support or refute the arguments of each side? Transcripts and audio recordings of hearings were thematically content analyzed and compared to address these questions. One overarching theme and four subsidiary themes emerged from the data that describe how risk is indirectly discussed in the formal procedures of the hearings and in individual interviews. The overarching theme is Insight and the four subsidiary themes are Elopement, Compliance, Drug-use, and Treatment. Compared across settings, the hearings were highly structured whereas the individual interviews allowed for a more complex analysis and explication of positions. In the context of the PSRB hearings, the testimony of the clinician was of primary importance in determination of insight and the source of information on the patient along the subsidiary themes.

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The subject matter of this thesis is a crime of habitual drunkenness under s. 360 of the Act No. 40/2009 - Criminal Code. The offense of drunkenness is atypical one among other offenses and unique in many ways. The aim of this work is to intelligibly and comprehensively describe the issue of the crime of drunkenness and aspects associated with it. The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter is devoted to the possible starting points and concepts. There are three basic approaches on the issue of the crime of drunkenness and four more which are based on the concept of so-called rauschdelikt. The second chapter examines the historical development of this issue in our country. There were different regimes over time and each of them approached resolved legal issues differently. For proper grasp and understanding of the current legal situation it is therefore necessary to look back in history. This chapter overviews the most important legislation, case law, and it also contains comparison of historical development with the present one, amended with regard to the development of the institute of insanity. Chapter three is the basis of this work. It consists of a detailed analysis of current legislation and careful analysis of the elements contained in s. 360 of the Criminal Code, then again...

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2009. / Title from title page screen (viewed on Oct. 23, 2009). Thesis advisor: Lynn Sacco. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Early intervention in psychosis emerged in the 1980s and has gradually become a new paradigm in mental health service worldwide. Yet, very few studies on the history of early intervention in mental illness exist even to date. This dissertation explored the situation in 19th century England when Britain was the only superpower in the world and at the same time was plagued by the rising number of insanity cases that she could only cope with by building more and bigger asylums. The idea of early treatment of insanity was found in various publications written by different physicians in the first half of 19th century. A few of them also proposed primary preventive measures as they believed that a good and disciplined life style could help to avoid the illness. They also saw that insanity could be hereditary. Meanwhile, the debate over the nature of insanity whether it is purely biological or goes beyond the physical body was happening in England as in continental Europe. The physicians supporting the idea of early intervention were also those who subscribed to the theory that insanity has a biological origin. The staging concept in the development of mental illness was well conceived by some physicians. There were also attempts to identify the symptoms in incipient insanity which is close to the modern concept of prodromal stage. Some medical professions also put forward detailed theories on the pathology of the illness based on their knowledge on brain physiology and its interaction with other organs of the body. During this period, professionalization of psychiatrists was advancing. In this process, there was clash between two schools of thoughts. One considered that the profession should move along a scientific path while the other considered that more effort should be devoted to pragmatic issues such as those concerning asylum management. This conflict had in some way hindered the advancement of early treatment. Another major obstacle to the provision of early treatment was the distrust of the society towards psychiatrists. After a number of notorious cases involving people being wrongly confined in the asylums had been widely publicized, the law was tightened to limit the authority of psychiatrists in certifying insanity and in treating uncertified cases. This had resulted in a serious blockade on the road to early treatment. Stigmatization of mental illness in the society was also a major factor in deterring people from seeking early assistance. From the experience in 19th century England, it was found that medicalization of mental illness, professionalization of psychiatrists, establishment of mutual trust between psychiatrists and the society, as well as de-stigmatization of mental illness would be conducive to the development of an early intervention paradigm. / published_or_final_version / Psychological Medicine / Master / Master of Psychological Medicine

Writers of golden age crime fiction (1920 to 1945), and in particular female writers, have been seen by many critics as socially and politically detached. Their texts have been read as morality tales, theoretically rich mise en scenès, or psychic fantasies, by necessity emerging from an historical epoch with unique cultural and social concerns, but only obliquely engaging with these concerns by toying with unstable identities, or through playful, but doomed, private transgressions. The thesis overturns assumptions about the crime novel as a negation of the present moment, detached and escapist, by demonstrating how crime narratives responded to public debates which highlighted some of the most pressing legal and philosophical concerns of their time. Grounded in meticulous historical research, the thesis draws attention to contemporary debates between antagonistic psychological schools – giving equal space to debates within psychoanalysis and adaptive neuroscience – and charts how these debates were reflected in crime writing. Chapter two explores the contestation of the M’Naghten laws on criminal responsibility in light of Ronald True’s case (1922), followed by readings of crime narratives in which perpetrators have ambiguous and controversial legal status in regard to criminal responsibility. At the intersection of psychiatric discourse and the popular literary imagination, a critical and ethical perspective developed which not only conveyed a version of psychological discourse to a wider public, but profoundly reworked the foundations of the genre as the ritual unveiling of deviancy and the restoration of the rational institutions of society. In similar vein, chapter three explores the status of the ‘Born Criminal’ in law and medicine, and looks at crime writer Gladys Mitchell’s efforts to expose both the pitfalls of categorisation, and competing discourses’ limitations in adequately accounting for crime. Chapter four, whilst maintaining close medical-legal focus, opens up the study to consider how understandings of deviant selfhood in modernist writing inflected crime writers’ representations of unconscious and epileptic killers. Finally, chapter five continues this intertextual approach by asserting that certain crime novels express an exhaustion with the genre’s classic rational and scientific heroes, and turn instead to the affective epistemologies and notions of subconscious synthesis concomitantly being celebrated in modernist writing. Altering the position of the authoritative detective in ways that profoundly alter the politics of the form, the chapter and the thesis in total propose a reading of golden age crime fiction more responsive to cultural, psychological and legal debates of the era, leading to a reassessment of the form as neither escapist nor purely affirmative of the status quo.

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