Crime and mental illness: impulsivity and jealousy in a case of uxoricide

Psychiatry has always played both a clinical and controller role of social dangerousness, in a culturally accepted vision. This variety of roles appears to be much more evident when psychiatry aims to study the relationships between aggressiveness, impulsivity, mental illness and crime. In those cases, psychiatrists must assess the capability to judge when a crime is committed, that is to say the imputability of a culprit affected by a mental illness, (articles 88 and 89 of the Italian Penal Code). There are cases in which a culprit suffers of a “major” mental illness, such as those belonging to the Axis I of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV-Text Revision (DSM IV-TR), or those which the classic psychopathology describes as schizophrenic psychosis or manic-depressive psychosis, but the culprit’s capability to distinguish between right and wrong is not impaired; a culprit is affected by a “minor” personality disorder, according to the DSM-IV, or by a psychopathic personality according to the old psychopathologic definition, but the capability to judge may be impaired in different ways. In the following work, we are going to explore the psychopathological profile of a borderline personality disorder in a case of uxoricide: the motive of the crime is jealousy and it’s carrying out arises from impulsivity that is a distinctive trait of this kind of personality. The psychopathological assessment was performed through several clinical interviews for the anamnestic data collection and the diagnostic classification and through a psycho-diagnostic protocol including the Rorschach test and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2).