Not Criminally Responsible

[Tylerr]

Hi all,

I'm new to this site so correct me if I'm posting this in the wrong section. I'm a first year psychiatric nursing student and I have a term paper coming up. The topic is that individuals diagnosed with a mental health disorder who have committed a crime should be found Not Criminally Responsible. I am having trouble writing this paper and any thoughts or opinions would be extremely helpful. Thanks!

[Tenebrae, BSN, RN]

Thank you all for the feedback. This definitely isn't my first essay as a uni student. What my opinion is and what I'm aruguing is that if an individual is diagnosed with a mental health disorder they should be found NOT criminally responsible. I have read through some academic articles and what I'm finding in common to support my argument is how prisons/jails worsen symptoms of mental illness and individuals would receive better/proper treatment in a hospital rather than behind bars. Should I save my last paragraph to explain the other side of the argument?

I have major depressive disorder. And as crappy as it makes me feel at time it does not impede my ability to know right from wrong.

IMO there are very few people with a mental illness who truly doesnt know right from wrong. I did a few shifts recently in a forensic rehab unit. Reading the index offenses of the patients, it would be true in those cases the persons ability to know right from wrong was severely impaired.

A special patient is someone who has been found not guilty based insanity. In 2012 in my country we had 84 special patients, out of 376,000 criminal offenses for the same year

Get on google, search for definition of criminally insane in your country, search the stats, it would be a good place to start

[joanna73, BSN, RN]

OP you would have access to peer reviewed journals through databases such as CINAHL. All Canadian university students have access to multiple nursing databases.

Rather than asking random strangers, you should be compiling evidence based research on this topic. Your professor will likely expect at least 5-10 quality references for a scholarly paper.

[MMC.RN]

I know you are in Canada, I am a forensic psych nurse in the States and this is what I do. Our unit has three different types of patients: assess for competency, treat to competency, and our NGRI or Not Guilty by Mental Disease or Defect.

Our assessment patients stay for two weeks or so and we assess them to see if they are fit to stand trial. A lot of times we have malingerers who try to act like they have a mental illness. Fortunately, they're usually pretty easy to spot.

Our treatment patients stay for up to a year. We medicate them , treat them, and teach them adjudicative terms so that they will be ready to stand trial.

Lastly, our NGRIs who have been sentenced to our facility because they were convicted but not criminally responsible. Just because you have an NGRI doesn't mean you get to, "walk away." If the crime is serious enough, you will get sent to a locked psych facility. In the States, you can petition q6months to be conditionally released. This is based on behavior and treatment length as well as the nature of the crime. The person has to be considered stable and no longer a danger to others.

To get an NGRI, at the moment you committed your crime you have to have an active mental illness and not understand the consequences of your actions. We tend to have a lot of individuals who committed homicide, however were actively psychotic and don't remember doing it. This doesn't mean that a person who has schizophrenia, was medicated and then murdered someone knowing what you were doing would get an NGRI. In this case, they would be held criminally responsible.

We also have a lot of patients who have personality disorders such as antisocial and borderline at our facility for this. I think the topic you chose is broad. Perhaps condense it to should individuals with personality disorders or another mental illness be held responsible? It is a very controversial topic and there is a lot of research out there on it especially with personality disorders.