Psychological characteristics of children and adolescent with conduct disorder

Abstract

Conduct disorder is one of the most frequently diagnosis among delinquent, so prevention of this disorder is one of the prior task in the effort to reduce the crime. However, difficulties on this plan arise even on the diagnostic level because rather behavioral criteria in DSM-IV do not enable precisely differentiation among children and adolescent whose antisocial behavior is transient from those whose is the result of some psychological characteristics and take risk of maintaining and become chronic through juvenile delinquencies and adult criminal. Nevertheless, DSM-IV declare that we put diagnosis of conduct disorder only when in basis of symptomatical behavior lay dysfunction inside individual and we do not put it when it is simply reaction on actually social context, in fact we have not any directions which will nearly determine the nature and contents of "dysfunctions inside personality" nor it is mentioned any method that we could employ to identify it. The fact that we can put this diagnosis only when foundation of conduct disorder is deeply inside in the individual make psychological clinical approach necessary in diagnostic procedure and in estimating prognostic importance of this disorder. Deeply exploration of juvenile personality with conduct disorder using Rorschach test and big sample demonstrate certain dysfunctions in structure and dynamic of children and adolescents which is almost in accordance with descriptions of the construct that many psychology of crime have conceptualized as early psychopathy (Hare, 1993), fledging psychopathy (Lynnam, 1966), early emotional frustration (Rygaard, 1998) etc.

Budući da je poremećaj u ponašanju najčešća dijagnoza među delinkventima prevencija ovog poremećaja spada u prioritetne zadatke u borbi protiv kriminala. Međutim, teškoće na ovom planu postoje već na dijagnostičkom nivou jer pretežno bihejvioralni kriterijumi u DSM-IV ne omogućavaju precizniju diferencijaciju dece i adolescenata kod koje je antisocijalno ponašanje prolaznog karaktera, od onih kod kojih je ono rezultat određenih psiholoških karakteristika i nosi rizik da se održi i hronificira delinkvencijom, a potom i odraslim kriminalnim ponašanjem. Iako se u DSM-IV (APA,1994) navodi da se poremećaj u ponašanju dijagnostifikuje samo onda "kada u osnovi simptomatičnog ponašanja leži disfunkcija unutar pojedinca, a ne onda kada je to ponašanje samo jednostavna neposredna reakcija na aktuelni socijalni kontekst", ne postoje nikakve smernice koje bi bliže odredile prirodu i sadržaj "disfunkcionalnosti unutar pojedinca", niti se pominju metode pomoću kojih bi se ona ustanovila. Otuda je psihološki pristup nužan i u dijagnostici ovog poremećaja i u proceni njegovog prediktivnog značaja. Dublja eksploracija ličnosti maloletnika sa ovom dijagnozom obavljena uz pomoć tzv. nomotetskog Rorshachovog testa na velikom uzorku ispitanika pokazuje određene disfunkcionalnosti u strukturi i dinamici dece i adolescenata sa poremećajima u ponašanju koja u potpunosti odgovara opisima konstrukta koga neki psiholozi kriminala konceptualizuju kao "rana psihopatija" (Hare, 1993), "poletarci psihopatije" (Lynam, 1996) i sl.