Don Hutton - Suicidality as an Explanation for Spousal Homicide

 

Abstract

A review is made of feminist explanations for spousal homicide, and a failure to investigate intrapsychic processes is noted. Recent work on suicide is cited as showing insight into cognitive processes involved in spousal homicide, for example, as an escape from pain (called “psychache”). 


Certain personality features, such as insecure attachment and borderline personality, are reviewed as especially vulnerable to psychache. For unknown reasons, males seem more susceptible to destructive behavior upon relationship dissolution. The main target of this destructive behavior is the self, followed by spousal homicide.


"In a study of 6,321 partner homicides, only 6.5% of female victims experienced domestic violence in the preceding month"


"5% of male victims in opposite-sex pairings were perpetrators of violence in the month preceding the homicide"


"Perpetrators of murder-suicide had profiles consistent with suicidal people but not with murderers"


Murder-suicide rates by country mirror national suicide rates rather than national homicide rates.


cf. "Psyche-ache"


https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/suicide-psychache-and-alienation


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Trans neurobiology links

  Brain Sex in Transgender Women Is Shifted towards Gender Identity (also contains many references to differentiation in brains between sexes) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8955456/ Is there something unique about the transgender brain? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-there-something-unique-about-the-transgender-brain/ Neurotransmitter size sex dimorphism, Sapolsky ( The bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) is a brain region that shows sex differences and has been found to be relevant in the study of transgender individuals. Specifically, research suggests that the size and neuron count in the central subdivision of the BNST (BSTc) in male-to-female (MtF) transsexuals is more similar to that of cisgender women. This finding has been interpreted as evidence that gender identity may be related to brain development influenced by prenatal sex ). Phantom penile sensation on penis removal does not occur in trans women, but does ...
Read more

How Men and Women's brains are different - Stanford

https://stanmed.stanford.edu/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different/ "  There was too much data pointing to the biological basis of sex-based cognitive differences to ignore, Halpern says. For one thing, the animal-research findings resonated with sex-based differences ascribed to people. These findings continue to accrue. In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks. A much more recent study established that boys and girls 9 to 17 months old — an age when children show few if any signs of recognizing either their own or other children’s sex — nonetheless show marked differences in their preference for stereotypically male versus stereotypically female toys."
Read more

Neurobiology of gender identity and sexual orientation

Pub Med Central   The empirical basis for hypothesising that gonadal hormones influence gender identity and sexual orientation is based on animal experiments involving manipulations of hormones during prenatal and early neonatal development. It is accepted dogma that testes develop from the embryonic gonad under the influence of a cascade of genes that begins with the expression of the sex-determining gene  SRY  on the Y chromosome. 4 , 5  Before this time, the embryonic gonad is “indifferent”, meaning that it has the potential to develop into either a testis or an ovary. Likewise, the early embryo has 2 systems of ducts associated with urogenital differentiation, Wolffian and Müllerian ducts, which are capable of developing into the male and female tubular reproductive tracts, respectively. Once the testes develop, they begin producing 2 hormones, testosterone and anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH). In rats, this occurs around day 16–17 of gestation, whereas, in humans, i...
Read more