NCJ Number
195618
Journal
Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health Volume: 11 Issue: 3 Dated: 2001 Pages: 131-143
Date Published
2001
Length
13 pages
Annotation
This study compared patients in a special hospital in England (Ashworth) and in a Dutch TBS Clinic (a type of facility under Dutch law which provides mental health services for offenders with personality and other psychiatric disorders).
Abstract
Both groups of patients had in common a clinical diagnosis of personality disorder within ICD-10, had committed serious offenses, and had been determined to require some form of treatment. A cross-sectional design was used. Selection of patients was initially at random (taking every third name from an alphabetical list) on the basis of a principal diagnosis of personality disorder. There were 37 completed interview forms from each site. An adapted version of the Lancashire Quality of Life Profile (LQOLP) (Oliver, 1991) was administered to patients in both groups. The LQOLP is a frequently used means of assessing individual well-being in community samples, and it has been shown to have reliability and validity. The life domains in the LQOLP are health, work/education, social relations, family relations, finance, legal/safety, religion, living circumstances, and leisure. Patients in the Dutch service reported a significantly higher quality of life that could not be explained by better objective circumstances. Although the data collected did not explain why the Dutch patients reported a higher quality of life, the authors suggest that this finding was related to more extensive therapeutic activity and greater therapeutic optimism in the Dutch services. The authors further advise that there is a need for scrutiny of the appropriateness of quality-of-life measures in offender patients before they are accepted for use as an outcome measure for treatment. 2 tables and 18 references