People with depression are more likely to commit violent crime, study concludes

People with depression are three times as likely to commit violent crime as are members of the general population, a new study concludes.

A team led by Seena Fazel of Oxford University linked Swedish health and crime databases to try to establish a link between cases of depression and crimes of violence. The threefold increase (odds ratio 3.0 (95% confidence interval 2.8 to 3.3) took account of possible confounding factors, but as a check the team also compared depressed people with their own non-depressed siblings. This produced a smaller odds ratio of 2.1 (1.8 to 2.4).1

The study, published in Lancet Psychiatry, also showed that depression scores were linked to an increasing risk of violence: the more …