Sexual Murder - Justicia Forense

6.3 The Predominance of DepressionOver the years, some clinicians have linked depression and homicide, butrelatively little research on this connection has been conducted in comparisonto the voluminous amount of study of each of these conditions individually.Although mental health practitioners automatically consider suicide to berelated to depression and therefore always assess it in a fairly detailed fashionin a depressed person, they often do not make the same connection tohomicide. In their review of 17 randomly selected psychiatric textbooks,Rosenbaum and Bennett (1986) found that 11 (64%) did not even mentionhomicide at all, and only two noted that homicide might have a relationshipto depression. Contemporary clinicians’ disregard for the associationbetween depression and homicide (Malmquist, 1996) continues a situationfirst noticed by Batt (1948) years earlier. In fact Muncie (1939), who was wellaware of the concept of catathymia, described “catathymic depression” with“catathymic ideation” leading to suicide rather than to violence.Depression alone, however, cannot explain an offender’s criminal acts;it is the change in thinking that results in action. Although catathymia isoften manifested in symptoms of depression (sleep disturbance, diminishedappetite, and somatic complaints), it is a dynamic-motivational process thatcan explain violent behavior. During the incubation phase of the chroniccatathymic process, the future offender experiences low mood and his thinkingbecomes obsessive, ruminative, and egocentric. Early in the incubationphase suicide thoughts predominate, but later they may recede or interminglewith homicidal ideas, which gain strength and become fixed.Therefore, to understand the offender’s criminal behavior, a motivationalor dynamic process (the catathymic process) is much more useful than adiagnosis of depression alone. In fact, many authors have reported cases ofdepressed individuals who committed homicides that had many of the classicsigns of the catathymic process but were not labeled as such. For example,Malmquist (1996) found that depression is directly related to some homicides,especially those depressions where there is a disturbance in thinking.“In the transition to the homicidal state is the emergence of the idea thatsomebody must pay for one’s suffering” (p. 247). Such an idea often becomesa “fixed belief” which Malmquist believes reaches delusional proportions.Whether such thinking is delusional or quasi-delusional is a matter of clinicaljudgment. But Malmquist’s description of the future offender’s thinking isexactly the kind of thought process Wertham (1937, 1978) described in thecatathymic crisis.In West’s (1967) classic study of murderers who commit suicide (commonin catathymic homicides), he differentiated a subgroup of depressedoffenders who were unable to live with their financial or sexual inadequacies.