Suchergebnisse

"When I first encountered Walter Manstein, a distinguished-looking man in his late forties, he had just strangled his wife to death with the leash of her pet dog. He came into my orbit because he had been admitted to the prison mental hospital, of which I was the medical director, for a pre-trial psychiatric evaluation. As bizarre as his crime was, it was no more gruesome than the murders that had been committed by many of the other inmates and mental patients I had seen. But Walter was a prominent and respected member of society, a successful publisher in one of the largest cities in the state, the father of a daughter and the husband of a woman to whom he had been married for twenty years, and with whom, as he made clear, he had wanted to remain married - until the night of the murder. When I first met him, I found it almost impossible to understand why in God's name a person whose prior behavior gave every evidence of strong moral character and psychological stability, and who had so many advantages that it would seem he had everything to lose, would end his wife's life, ruin their daughter's life, and effectively end his own life as well?"--

Shakespeare has been dubbed the greatest psychologist of all time. This book seeks to prove that statement by comparing the playwright's fictional characters with real-life examples of violent individuals, from criminals to political actors. For Gilligan and Richards, the propensity to kill others, even (or especially) when it results in the killer's own death, is the most serious threat to the continued survival of humanity. In this volume, the authors show how humiliated men, with their desire for retribution and revenge, apocryphal violence and political religions, justify and commit violence, and how love and restorative justice can prevent violence. Although our destructive power is far greater than anything that existed in his day, Shakespeare has much to teach us about the psychological and cultural roots of all violence. In this book the authors tell what Shakespeare shows, through the stories of his characters: what causes violence and what prevents it.

OBJECTIVES: Currently, little is known regarding the effect of regime type on mortality on a global level. The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of regime type on the rates of violent deaths (homicide, suicide, and combined rates). METHODS: Three measures of democracy were used to quantify regime type, the independent variable. Homicide and suicide rates were obtained from the World Health Organization. Multivariate conditional fixed-effects models were run to examine associations between regime characteristics and logged rates of homicide, suicide, and violent deaths. Models were adjusted for unemployment and economic inequality. RESULTS: Nations that scored higher on democracy indices, especially emerging democracies, experienced increased mortality due to violence. Homicide and suicide were divergent, showing a different time course and decreasing statistical power as a combined variable. Unemployment and inequality were associated with higher violence-related mortality. CONCLUSIONS: Homicide and suicide appear to be more prevalent in democracies. Future analyses should examine which aspects of democracies lead to higher rates of violent death and should seek to use independently collected mortality data.