Attitudes Towards the Concept of Death among Individuals with Mental Disorders Who Have Committed Violent Crimes

The article analyzes structural and dynamic features of the attitude toward death in individuals with borderline mental disorders who have committed aggressive wrongful acts. A total of 45 defendants, who were undergoing stationary psychological and psychiatric examination at the V.P. Serbsky State Research Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry, and 109 law-abiding citizens were examined. The study showed that the emotional-semantic structure of attitude towards the concept of death in people with mental abnormalities differs significantly from the structure of this attitude among mentally healthy subjects. We further hypothesize that the inversion of the emotional-semantic structure of the concept of death with undifferentiated emotional-evaluative characteristics is the result of the weak elaboration of the subject in the minds of the people surveyed.

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