A Case Study of Paternal Filicide-Suicide: Personality Disorder, Motives, and Victim Choice

Although evidence with respect to its prevalence is mixed, it is clear that fathers perpetrate a serious proportion of filicide. There also seems to be a consensus that paternal filicide has attracted less research attention than its maternal counterpart and is therefore less well understood. National registries are a very rich source of data, but they generally provide limited information about the perpetrator as psychiatric, psychological and behavioral data are often lacking. This paper presents a fully documented case of a paternal filicide. Noteworthy is that two motives were present: spousal revenge as well as altruism. The choice of the victim was in line with emerging evidence indicating that children with disabilities in general and with autism in particular are frequent victims of filicide-suicide. Finally, a schizoid personality disorder was diagnosed. Although research is quite scarce on that matter, some research outcomes have showed an association between schizoid personality disorder and homicide and violence.

Tinnitus severity and the relation to depressive symptoms: A critical study

Introduction

Research indicates that subjective tinnitus severity varies among tinnitus patients. One of the variables held responsible for these differences is depression. However the relationship between depression and tinnitus severity was never investigated more in depth.

Objectives

If depression is responsible for differences in subjective tinnitus severity two conditions need to be fulfilled. First, there should be evidence for the presence of moderate to severe depressive symptomatology in a substantial group, and second, there should be evidence for a substantial relationship between depressive symptoms and tinnitus severity which can not be explained due to method and content overlap.

Aims

In this study we investigated whether tinnitus severity is a depression related problem.

Methods

136 consecutive help-seeking tinnitus patients were seen by a psychologist and an audiologist. All patients filled in the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II), the Tinnitus Handicap Inventory (THI), and underwent psychoacoustic measurement (pitch and loudness).

Results

Mean scores indicate the presence of no or minimal depressive symptoms. There was only a positive correlation (p < .01) between the BDI-II and the THI. No correlations were found between psychoacoustic measures and the self-report questionnaires. Linear regression analysis revealed that only the somatic depression subscale significantly predicted tinnitus severity.

Conclusions

Tinnitus does not seem to be a depression-like problem. There is no substantial group of tinnitus patients with moderate to severe depressive symptoms. The relation between depressive symptoms and tinnitus severity seems to be an artefact due to content overlap between de THI and the somatic subscale of the BDI-II.

Alexithymia and interpersonal functioning:an extension of empirical research by using a dimensional approach for interpersonal style and the structured interview for alexithymia

Introduction

The concept of alexithymia refers to problems in experiencing and regulating affects; clinical study as well as empirical research suggests that alexithymia is related to cold and socially inhibited interpersonal functioning. However, empirical studies frequently use only self report questionnaires.

Objectives/aims

This study investigates the relation between alexithymia and self-reported interpersonal problems. By using an interview measure of alexithymia next to a questionnaire, we want to avoid artificially high correlations due to shared method variance and thus get a clearer picture of the link between alexithymia and interpersonal style. We hypothesize that alexithymia will be related to a cold, but not to a dominant or submissive interpersonal style.

Method

The Toronto Structured Interview for Alexithymia (TSIA) was administered by a trained researcher to 74 psychiatric inpatients, who also filled out the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) and the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (IIP-64). Dimensional affiliation and dominance scores of the IIP-64 were computed and Pearson correlations between TSIA, TAS-20 and IIP-64 dimensional scores were calculated.

Results

As hypothesized, we observed no significant correlation between TSIA, TAS-20 and the dominance dimension of the IIP-64 and a significant correlation between the affiliation dimension and TSIA and TAS-20.

Conclusions

Our results support previous research and confirm that alexithymia is related to a cold interpersonal style. Since our findings converge for both measurements of alexithymia, the link between alexithymia and interpersonal style can not be explained by shared method variance. The measurement of only self-reported interpersonal problems is a limitation of this study.

P02 - 368 - Interactions between obsessive - compulsive symptoms and interpersonal profiles during short - term psychodynamic therapy

Introduction

An increasing amount of outcome research supports the efficacy of Short Term Psychodynamic Psychotherapy (STPP) for a wide range of psychological disorders, reporting effect sizes in meta-analyses between 0.50 and 1.40 (for review see Shedler, 2010). Mapping mechanisms of change in the STPP process can be considered the major challenge of STPP for the decades to come.

Objectives/aims

This study focuses on STPP with Obsessive-Compulsive (OC) patients and tests the hypothesis that the progressive elimination of OC symptoms throughout an STPP process is correlated to a parallel process of change at the level of interpersonal characteristics.

Method

Mixed quantitative-qualitative analyses of data of Short Term Psychodynamic Therapies with four OC patients are presented. Repeated Measures analyses are performed to study intra-subject associations between intensity of OC symptoms (measured by General Health Questionnaire, GHQ-12, and Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory, OCI-R) and interpersonal characteristics (measured by Inventory of Interpersonal Problems, IIP-32).

Results

Observed associations between evolutions in general interpersonal characteristics and general complaints were significant yet inconsistent across the patients. Qualitative analyses, however, revealed similarities on the level of specific interpersonal characteristics, in this respect that all patients struggled to escape the suffocating impact of parental figures and/or romantic partners.

Conclusions

Rather than elaborating a general interpersonal style (cfr. Desmet et al., 2008), the results suggest that a progressive elaboration of parent-child and partner relationships is a crucial characteristic of the STPP process with OC patients. Limitations of the study are the small sample size and the absence of contrast- and control groups.