Violence and official diagnostic nomenclature.

There have been increasing concerns about the relationship between mental disorders and violence during the past 15 years. Monahan I notes that there is a persistent belief in a positive association between the two, despite empirical evidence suggesting that such an association is anecdotal at best. He further suggests that inadequate definitions are a major problem in studying this relationship. One measure of the degree to which we have officially accepted the belief in a positive association between mental disorders and violence would be to compare the proportions of disorders with descriptive phrases or diagnostic criteria, including words about violent acts among our past and present diagnostic nomenclatures. Although these diagnostic schemata are different, this would provide a rough index of our changing conceptualization of this relationship. In this article, I report the change in these proportions and discuss some medicolegal and basic research implications of this observation.