[Clinical characteristics of depression in women in forensic- psychiatric practice].

A study has been carried out of the post-delivery and involutional depressive states through an analysis of 121 case reports of women with psychogenic depressions, who had committed severe crimes and were under the stationary forensic psychiatric investigation at the Serbsky All-Union Research Institute for General and Forensic Psychiatry. The data have shown that during the post-delivery and involutional periods and under some objectively hard and subjectively valuable psychogenic traumatic conditions, women may develop depressive psychoses which are accompanied by pathologically altruistic motivations for socially dangerous actions that are usually directed towards children, grandchildren and close relatives. The neurosis-like phase in the development of such states was discovered, promoting prevention of crimes in the described population of patients.