ABSTRACT
Some offenders experience mental health-related issues which interrupt their normal processing of thought and emotion. The way that thoughts and emotions impact on their behaviour is of interest to psychologists, but also to forensic psychologists in their understanding of the relationship between mental disorder and criminal behaviour. The classification of mental disorders, based on the clustering of symptoms, is described in the diagnostic statistical manual (DSM). Mental disorders such as schizophrenia and personality disorders like antisocial personality disorder (APD) or its extreme manifestation, psychopathy, tend to appear commonly in criminal populations. This means that forensic psychologists are very likely to come across offenders with either a mental or a personality disorder. While using DSM and other assessments makes it easier to identify these offenders, it can be more difficult to tailor an appropriate treatment to a hallucinating and deluded person with schizophrenia, or a lying and manipulative psychopathic individual, either of whom continues to offend.
