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. 2020 Dec 15;10(12):1091.
doi: 10.3390/diagnostics10121091.

Neurocognitive Functioning and Suicidal Behavior in Violent Offenders with Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders

Miriam Sánchez-Sansegundo  1 , Irene Portilla-Tamarit  1 , María Rubio-Aparicio  1 , Natalia Albaladejo-Blazquez  1 , Nicolás Ruiz-Robledillo  1 , Rosario Ferrer-Cascales  1 , Ana Zaragoza-Martí  2
Affiliations

Neurocognitive Functioning and Suicidal Behavior in Violent Offenders with Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders

Miriam Sánchez-Sansegundo et al. Diagnostics (Basel). .

Abstract

Suicide is one of the main premature causes of death in patients with schizophrenia. However, little is known about the relationship between neurocognitive functioning and suicidality in violent offenders with schizophrenia who have been sentenced to psychiatric treatment after committing violent crimes. We examined the neurocognitive functioning of a sample of 61 violent offenders, most of them murderers with schizophrenia who were classified as suicide attempters (n = 26) and non-attempters (n = 35). We compared the neurocognitive functioning of both groups using a neuropsychological battery. Suicide attempters showed similar performance to non-attempters in a neuropsychological test across all domains of cognitive functioning, memory, attention, verbal fluency, and executive functioning. However, after controlling for demographic and clinical variables, suicide attempters performed better than non-attempters in two planning-related tasks: the Tower of London (p < 0.01) and the Zoo Map (p < 0.01). Suicide attempters were also characterized as having more family histories of suicidality and as displaying more depressive symptoms and negative symptoms of psychopathology on the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) scale. These results suggest that suicide attempters have a greater ability to formulate plans and initiate goals directed at making a suicide attempt.

Keywords: neurocognition; neuropsychology; offenders; schizophrenia; suicide.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.

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