A retrospective study of forensic patients referred by the judicial courts of Cebu province & its component cities to Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center- Psychiatry Department for Psychiatric Evaluation from 1999-2003

OBJECTIVES: This study will describe the demographic and clinical profile of forensic patients referred to VSMMC. It will describe the association between the ff: patients' mental disorder, their criminal offenses and the courts' decisions.METHODOLOGY: This is a retrospective study of all forensic patients referred by the Judicial Courts for psychiatric evaluation from 1999-2003 to the VSMMC and whose residential address was in Cebu Province and its component cities. Data was obtained from the hospital's Outpatient Department records and from the Bureau of Jail Management and Penology after securing permission to review their files. Data was analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software i.e. frequency, percentage, correlation coefficient and chi square test for independence.RESULTS: Sixty-eight patients were included in the study. Majority of patients belonged to the age range of 20-39 years old (72.05%), mostly male (91.2%), single (67.65%), Roman Catholic (98.5%), from rural areas (83.8%) who reached either elementary (36.8%) or secondary (41.2%) levels but remained unemployed (77.9%). Majority (89.7%) of patients were diagnosed to have a psychotic disorder such as: Substance Induced Psychosis (41.2%), Schizophrenia (22.1%), Bipolar I (22.1%) and Brief Psychotic (4.4%). About a third of the cases (39.7%) were dismissed since these were less serious crimes such as illegal possession of methamphetamine HCl, theft, shoplifting and oral defamation; while 22.1% were convicted with serious crimes like murder, rape, homicide, and robbery. The correlation between patients' mental disorder and criminal offense committed was 24.496, while the correlation between the mental disorder and the judicial courts' decision was 21.937, both of which were statistically significant.CONCLUSION: The mental disorder of the offenders had an influence on the type of crime committed and on the judicial courts.

The prevalence of psychiatric disorders among the chronically-ill medical patients in selected tertiary hospitals in the Philippines

OBJECTIVE: This study was conducted to document the prevalence of psychiatric morbidity among chronically ill medical patients in selected hospitals in the Philippines. METHODS: This is a cross-sectional study of the chronically medically ill patients seen in selected Primary are Evaluation of Mental Disorders (PRIME-MD), 774 patients were screened for mental disorders. The prevalence of each of the psychiatric disorders were calculated using the formula for estimation of a proportion for stratified random sampling. The differences in the sample size from each of the study sites were taken into consideration in the estimation of the sitespecific prevalence of mental disorders. The 95 percent confidence intervals of the prevalence rates were computed. RESULTS: Almost half of the patients (47.8 percent) were diagnosed with at least one of the psychiatric disorders elicited from the PRIME-MD. Thirty two percent had depressive disorder, followed by anxiety disorder, somatoform disorders, alcohol-related disorder and eating disorder. According to hospital site, the overall prevalence rate of psychiatric disorder was noted to be highest at the Davao Medical Center. CONCLUSION: The overall prevalence of psychiatric disorder noted in this study was higher than that described in foreign literature, the most common of which was depression.