The Tattooed Psychiatric Patient

Systematic psychiatric studies of tattooed men are rare. Lander and Kohn (1943) noted that they had a higher rate of rejection for military service on psychiatric grounds than non-tattooed men. Yamamoto et al. (1963) studied the male population of a Veterans Hospital. They compared the 65 (15 per cent) men who were tattooed with the 368 who were not. They found that the percentage of tattooed men on the psychiatric wards was not significantly higher than that on the general medical or surgical wards; the tattooed men, however, exhibited significantly more evidence of personality deviation than the non-tattooed men.