Psychiatry and the Railway Vandal*
| Author | Kerry L Milte,Allen A Bartholomew |
| Date | 01 September 1979 |
| Published date | 01 September 1979 |
| DOI | 10.1177/000486587901200307 |
AUST &NZ JOURNAL OF CRIMIN()L()CY (September 1979) 12 (175-176)
PSYCHIATRY AND
THE
RAILWAY VANDALo
Allen A Bartholomew]
and
Kerry L Miltet
17.5
Summary
Psychiatric referrals to the
Department
of Mental Hygiene (Victoria) of 139 consecutive railway
vandals is investigated
and
the diagnoses
made
noted. It is concluded that railway vandalism in
Victoria is not a feature of gross psychiatric disturbance or pathology.
The
problem of vandalism is considerable
and
the community
may
well feel
seriously threatened by such behaviour. In some cases the vandal
may
be
considered a"normal" person, usually a youth, who has simply given full vent to
his aggressive -and- destructive urges. In other cases, the vandal
may
have
behaved in a variety of ways over the preceding
Y61rs
so that he
had
come into
contact with various psychiatric facilities, or his earlier behaviour plus the
incident of vandalism causes the individual to attend some clinic or hospital.
It is quite impossible to exhaustively research the matter of psychiatric
referral, investigation
and
treatment in any group of persons charged with
vandalism other than to have extensive interviews with each of them and, in
many cases, their families and other persons closely involved in their lives. There
is, for example, no other way of obtaining evidence of private psychiatric
consultation, psychiatric referral to the various public hospitals, involvement
with general practitioners
who
have a considerable amount of psychiatric
interest and expertise,
and
other counselling services including such as the School
Psychological Service.
However, it was considered likely that the vast majority of the more seriously
disturbed vandals would have been referred to the Department of Mental
Hygiene as there are few psychiatrists working with childrenand adolescents in
Melbourne, let alone Victoria, and it is not easy to obtain admission to the
psychiatric department of the Royal Children's Hospital, in-patient or
out-patient.
A list of a consecutive group of persons with vandalism in relation to the
Victoria Railways was obtained from the Railway Police.
The
offenders
had
all
offended in
the
early
part
of 1976
and
the list contained 139 names. These names
were checked against the records of the Department of Mental Hygiene. All the
information available was whether or not the offender was known to the
Department, the facility attended
and
the date,
and
the diagnosis made.
Results
The
mean age of the whole group of 139 was 17.50years
and
there were eight
offenders whose ages were very well away from the mean: 50, 49, 36, 32, 30, 28,
28 and 6 years.
• We thank the Victoria Railways for giving us the names of the cases,
and
the Department of
Mental Hygiene (Victoria) for the psychiatric data.
Our
thanks also to
both
Departments for
permission to publish this report.
tFRCPsych, FRANZCP, DPM, MAPsS; Consultant in Charge, Psychiatric Clinic, HMP Pentridge:
and Hon Senior Associate,
Department
of Psychiatry
and
Part-time lecturer, Department of
Criminology, University of Melbourne.
tLIB, Dip Crim; Barrister of the Supreme
Court
of Victoria; Senior Lecturer, Department of
Criminology, University of Melbourne.
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