TY  - JOUR
AU  - Karystianis, George
AU  - Simpson, Annabeth
AU  - Adily, Armita
AU  - Schofield, Peter
AU  - Greenberg, David
AU  - Wand, Handan
AU  - Nenadic, Goran
AU  - Butler, Tony
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/12/24
TI  - Prevalence of Mental Illnesses in Domestic Violence Police Records: Text Mining Study
JO  - J Med Internet Res
SP  - e23725
VL  - 22
IS  - 12
KW  - text mining
KW  - mental illnesses
KW  - domestic violence
KW  - police data
KW  - trend analysis
AB  - Background: The New South Wales Police Force (NSWPF) records details of significant numbers of domestic violence (DV) events they attend each year as both structured quantitative data and unstructured free text. Accessing information contained in the free text such as the victim’s and persons of interest (POI's) mental health status could be useful in the better management of DV events attended by the police and thus improve health, justice, and social outcomes. Objective: The aim of this study is to present the prevalence of extracted mental illness mentions for POIs and victims in police-recorded DV events. Methods: We applied a knowledge-driven text mining method to recognize mental illness mentions for victims and POIs from police-recorded DV events. Results: In 416,441 police-recorded DV events with single POIs and single victims, we identified 64,587 events (15.51%) with at least one mental illness mention versus 4295 (1.03%) recorded in the structured fixed fields. Two-thirds (67,582/85,880, 78.69%) of mental illnesses were associated with POIs versus 21.30% (18,298/85,880) with victims; depression was the most common condition in both victims (2822/12,589, 22.42%) and POIs (7496/39,269, 19.01%). Mental illnesses were most common among POIs aged 0-14 years (623/1612, 38.65%) and in victims aged over 65 years (1227/22,873, 5.36%). Conclusions: A wealth of mental illness information exists within police-recorded DV events that can be extracted using text mining. The results showed mood-related illnesses were the most common in both victims and POIs. Further investigation is required to determine the reliability of the mental illness mentions against sources of diagnostic information. 
SN  - 1438-8871
UR  - http://www.jmir.org/2020/12/e23725/
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2196/23725
UR  - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33361056
DO  - 10.2196/23725
ID  - info:doi/10.2196/23725
ER  -