Mental Health Research
Terri introduced Dr. Marni Rice, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and employee of the Mental Healtlh Centre for 34 years and Director of Research for 14. She's now part time and acting as an ethicist, a Prof. Psychiatry at the Universities of McMaster, Toronto, and Queen's and as an author with 140 publications and 6 books. She's the recipient of multiple awards, and has been on radio and TV.
Dr. Rice said she started at the Centre in 1975, the same year the Research Department began. She joined Research as the second staff person in 1980 and the Department now has 7 FT positions and some students and contract staff. It began with a vision of a centre for research in forensic psychiatry and is now the largest such department anywhere and also, she thinks, the most productive. They work with sex offenders, assaultive patients and the assessment of risk. There have been 300 publications from the Department.
Measurements on patients and volunteers, who have been wired and then shown pictures, are compared to see if there are correlations or differences that would permit predictions of behaviour to be made. The Department has established that there are distinct and reliable predictors. Other behaviours, such as racism, can be predicted too.
The Department researches violence inside the institution too, trying to predict the likelihood. They have developed a training course for staff and have been able to reduce the number of assaults and injury for staff and patients and the course has been taken up by other institutions. Assessing the risk of the likelihood of male offenders engaging in violent acts again can also be of help to parole boards. Recent studies follow men who have been studied for 50 years and from this they have developed a risk evaluation tool and they have increased public safety. She admits nothing is perfect but this all helps.
Her book on domestic assaults will be out this summer, written in co-operation with the OPP, studying those men police have been involved with and evaluting who among them are likely to be involved in another assault. Generally it is the same kind of guys involved sexual or domestic assaults, or in violence. They are psychopaths - callous and unemotional. The department is following them. Dr. Rice thinks there is probably an evolutionary development. It is a controversial thesis but she is convinced that these men are different in a fundamental way, not a sliding scale.
Men who are very successful in an evolutionary sense have more children, pick more fertile women to breed with, begin having sex earlier. But these men now pursue these objectives in a different society, one that goes beyond a strict evolutionary purpose.
She thinks there's still lots to do, lots of areas to explor and she considers herself fortunate to have had this career and to worked in this area.