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Coping strategies and defense mechanisms are an individual's important personality traits which strongly influence the ease with which people are able to form and maintain healthy relationships. Certain psychological traits including coping strategies and defenses are frequently detected in the personalities of criminals prone to aggression and maladjustment. Identification of these will be helpful in predicting risk of criminal acts in these patients as well as their better management. A total of 25 male mentally ill criminals and 25 normal controls were selected through purposive sampling technique. Defense Mechanism Inventory (DMI) and Brief Approach/Avoidance Coping Questionnaire (BACQ) were administered individually. Mann Whitney-U test was used to find out differences between two groups. Results showed that mentally ill criminals used more of maladaptive defenses like Turning against object (TAO), Projection (PRO), Turning against self (TAS) and Reversal (REV), but used less an adaptive defense mechanism of Principalization (PRN). As regard coping strategy, the criminal mentally ill patients lagged behind significantly to approach a problem situation and avoided them than the normal controls by keeping themselves away from social interaction, lacking planning and action related diversions showed negative attitude regarding tackling current problems.
Key Words: Defense Mechanism, Coping Strategy, Criminal Mentally III
It is generally agreed that both coping strategies and defense mechanisms represent adaptive efforts to manage perceived threats whose demands exceed available resources and thus they produce beneficial psychological and social effects to the individual (Ihilevich and Gleser, 1986). Coping strategies are often conceptualized as personal resources of an individual in his or her psychological adaptation to stressful situations or events (Engel, 1977; Pétrie and Moss-Morris, 1997). Whenever a person's internal resources, skills, or motivation are insufficient to resolve inner conflicts or master external threats to well being, the psychological defenses come into play as relatively stable response dispositions that serve to distort the reality (Ihilevich and Gleser, 1986). However, some investigators use the concepts of coping strategies and defense mechanisms interchangeably.
Reacting to frustrating, difficult and painful situations and experiences, they function as an automatic and well synchronized firewall, helping to defend against hurting and abusive relationships and promote healthy and nurturing relationships (Khan et al., 2008).
Crime is one of the greatest evils of our society and clinicians commonly identify...