Soc Psychiat Epidemiol (2011) 46:29–34 DOI 10.1007/s00127-009-0167-5 O R I G I N A L P A P E R Violent victimisation of psychiatric patients: a Swedish case–control study Joakim Sturup • Karolina Sorman • Per Lindqvist • Marianne Kristiansson Received: 22 July 2009 / Accepted: 27 October 2009 / Published online: 16 November 2009 The Author(s) 2009. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract Objectives To report the rate of violent victimisation of psychiatric patients 1 year before interview and to examine the relative rate in comparison to the general population. Method Cases were recruited from two public psychi- atric hospitals in Stockholm County (n = 390). The controls comprised gender- and age-matched people interviewed in an annual national survey of living con- ditions (n = 1,170). Results Twenty percent of the patients had been victi- mised during the preceding year. The relative rate was six times higher than that of the controls. Women appeared to be most vulnerable with a tenfold risk increase. Conclusions The ﬁndings stress that psychiatric patients are vulnerable to other people’s violent behaviour. Violent victimisation Keywords Violence Victimisation Mental disorder Introduction Violence towards people with mental disorders appears to be a neglected area in research as well as in clinical practice. This stands in contrast to the well investigated J. Sturup (&) K. Sorman P. Lindqvist M. Kristiansson Division of Forensic Psychiatry, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Box 4044, 141 04 Huddinge, Sweden e-mail: joakim.sturup@ki.se link between mental disorders and violence perpetration. The concept of violent victimisation, as used here, refers to being subjected to physical violence in adult years [20]. The literature reports a high rate of such violence towards people with mental disorders [1, 2, 5, 17, 18, 21, 22, 25] and, even more importantly, controlled studies show that the risk is substantially higher compared to the general population [4, 19, 20, 23]. In a comprehensive review of studies from North America on violent behaviour by and towards people with mental disorder, Choe and colleagues [3] argue that victimisation of the mentally disordered should be of greater public health concern than their violent behaviour towards others. Violent and sexual victimisation towards people with major mental disorder have been linked to poor community functioning, homelessness, hallucinations, delusions and low quality of life [11, 14, 15]. Up to date only three studies have examined the impact of treatment for the occurrence of victimisation [5, 9, 22]. Two UK studies found no signiﬁcant reduction of victimisation in an intensive treatment group compared to a standard treatment group [5, 22]. A study from USA on people with severe mental illness showed that patients who were discharged to out-patient mandatory treatment were signiﬁcantly less likely to be victimised than patients who were discharged without such compulsory treatment [9]. Aims of the study Since there is no Swedish survey and no European con- trolled study of victimisation of psychiatric patients, this study was set up in order to report the rate of violent vic- timisation of general psychiatric patients and to examine the relative rate in comparison to the general population. 123