New research published in the Lancet journal has revealed that people with depression are about three times more likely to commit a violent crime than someone who is not depressed.
This is an impressive study – based on 47,000 Swedish people – but we need to be extremely cautious about how we interpret the results. The research shows that extremely few depressed people are actually convicted of violent crimes: 3.7% of men and 0.5% of women, compared with 1.2% of men and 0.2% of women in the general population. In fact, depressed people are more at risk of harming themselves than they are of harming anyone else – like Charlie Waller, a young man who killed himself aged 28 and whom the institute I work at is named after.
Related: Diagnosed depression linked to violent crime, says Oxford University study
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