Accuracy of self-reported arrests among a forensic SPMI population

Self-reports are prone to response error even in the most structured and standardized environment, but the highly stigmatizing nature of illegal behavior and the possible cognitive problems inherent to the SPMI population increase the likelihood of such error. Using administrative data as the gold standard, the validity of self-reported arrests was examined among 85 mentally ill substance-abusing individuals with justice involvement. The overall accuracy of self-reported arrests during a three-month recall period was 84.7%. Validity was higher among individuals who at the time of the follow-up interview were either in a jail diversion program or incarcerated. Individuals with a mood disorder appeared to be somewhat less accurate in their self-reports than subjects with schizophrenia, despite the implication of cognitive distortion accompanying this latter diagnostic category. Further research on issues such as the accuracy of self-reports over longer recall periods, or the accuracy of self-reported frequency of arrest, is necessary, given the reliance on self-report methodology in outcome studies.     

Traces of the Person: Max Scheler’s and Paul Ricoeur’s Attempts on Personal Ethics

To encounter a fellow-being does not mean only to see her face, to notice the color of her eyes, but to meet her eyes and to be addressed by her. Who one is irreducible to any objective property or value, and likewise cannot be comprehended through propositional statements in the manner of “talking about …” something. Rather, such comprehension demands an account of giving way to the appearance of the other as other. This account, prominently linked to E. Levinas’ “ethics as first philosophy,” has also been developed as phenomenological personalism. While Max Scheler developed his “Ethical Personalism” within his material Value Ethics, his Philosophy of Fellow-Feeling and in his late Philosophical Anthropology of human spirit, Paul Ricoeur develops his personalism through different approaches: from his early attempts on need and desire as the affective basis of our values to the perspective on the particular way we lead our lives in narratively constituting our personal identity, and finally to his concept of recognition. Reconstructing personalism as a philosophy of discovering the other person in her otherness and as a concept of social practice are the aims of this paper.