NCJ Number
121549
Journal
Law and Human Behavior Volume: 13 Issue: 4 Dated: (December 1989) Pages: 375-383
Date Published
1989
Length
9 pages
Annotation
Information from 39 criminal defendants diagnosed as malingering psychotic symptoms and 25 defendants diagnosed as genuinely psychotic formed the basis of an analysis of the incidence of malingering and the diagnostic criteria for malingering used by forensic clinical psychologists who conduct pretrial psychological evaluations.
Abstract
The defendants had all been referred to the Michigan Center for Forensic Psychiatry for outpatient pretrial evaluation of competency to stand trial, criminal responsibility, or both. The Center is the main facility required to conduct these evaluations for the State. Six clinical staff psychologists with doctoral degrees used standard diagnostic criteria from the American Psychiatric Association to identify cases diagnosed as psychotic, malingering psychosis, or nonpsychotic and not malingering from a consecutive series of 314 cases evaluated over a 6-month period. The incidence of diagnosed malingering was 8 percent. Malingerers differed from psychotics on 14 of 24 clinical presentation variables, including measures of general presentation, affect, hallucinations, delusions, and formal thought disorder. Results indicated that consistent clinical features are associated with the diagnosis of malingered psychosis. Tables and 9 references.