난폭한 환자의 치료

Treatment o f Violent Patients

Violent and impulsive behavior, in general, can be defined as threatening or destructive acts or ideations to animate or inanimate objects. While violence is no stranger to psychiatrists, it is probably less of problem in psychiatric populations than one would expect. Violence is not and exclusive problem of the emotionally ill, and, in general, it is more prominent in those who are not emotionally ill than those who are. Furthermore, violence in psychiatric inpatients against hospital staff was a most uncommon phenomena. Despite these explanations that violent behavior in the mentally ill is relatively rare, we occasionally meet severe violent patients in our clinical practice. Some of them display very serious destructions or assault which are followed by major accident, such as, severe self-injuries, damages to other patients or hospital staffs or rarely homicide. And these major accidents perpetrated by psychiatric patients frequently cause very difficult legal problems. They also have very negativistic and antitherapeutic influences on ordinary hospital settings. It is true that the more we understand about patient’ s violence, the better we can handle, manage and treat these patients. So, the author reviewed some articles and summarized these theories about various aspects of violence in the mentally i l l ; etiology of violence, its psychopathology, characteristics, predictors, prevention, management, treatment and its related legal problems.