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The phenomenon of murder-suicide (aka. homicide-suicide) makes a sizeable impact on current public perceptions and policies regarding mental illness and risk for violence. However, within the past 25 years, our understanding of murder-suicide has remained relatively stable, and so has our relative inability to reliably predict and prevent it. The purpose of this paper is to propose pathways for furthering a cogent understanding of murder-suicide that may inform specific predictive and preventative practices.

Research literature regarding empirical and theoretical positions in the fields of murder-suicide, homicide, and suicide are reviewed and discussed.

While murder-suicide has many similarities to both homicide and suicide, no current theories of either alone have been successful in fully incorporating the phenomenon of murder-suicide. Theories specific to murder-suicide as a unique form of violence are in need of further research.

Developing and empirically testing theories of murder-suicide may lead to a vast and needed improvement of our understanding, prediction, and prevention of these tragedies.

Senior individuals are far more commonly the victims of aggression than the perpetrators, but a small minority of older adults do commit crimes. This paper describes the case of a male older adult who battered his wife to death and presented with amnesia about the attack. It describes the neuropsychological, risk and personality assessment procedures adopted to assess functioning, evaluate risk of re‐offending and formulate about the offence. It proposes formulations for the offence and illustrates the treatment provided to ameliorate distress and enhance memories of what had taken place. Finally it highlights areas for future research and service development. With a growing older adult population, the need for specialist assessment and risk management of older adults who offend is likely to increase, so more resources should be allocated to meeting the needs of such individuals.

Although homicide-suicide (H-S) offences are rare, they have remarkably tragic consequences. The purposes of this paper are to: examine the background characteristics of H-S offenders (including previous offending history and psychiatric elements); describe the crime-scene behavior and examine the motivational aspects of the offences; and to establish the reliability in the outlined typologies.

The study consists of case series of all H-S offenders in Sweden, January 1, 2007 to December 31, 2009 (n=13), and data was collected from medico-legal autopsy reports, police investigations and three national databases.

Of all Swedish homicides, 5.5 percent consisted of H-S cases, and the rate of H-S was 0.05 per 100,000 inhabitants. Seven of the offenders had had previous contact with a psychiatric service, however, the average time between the last contact and the offence was slightly more than four years. Three of the offenders had previously been convicted of a violent crime and nine of the 13 offenders were involved in serious marital conflicts during the time of the offence. In conclusion, the study supports the notion that cases of H-S are mainly associated with intimate partner homicides, rather than suicide or other homicides. However, the offences were not always directly aimed toward the (former) spouse, but instead carried out through a proxy (such as a common child).

The study adds in-depth knowledge by using a qualitative approach in an otherwise scarce area of research.

There is a burgeoning body of evidence showing that police officers are at a higher risk of committing homicide-suicide than civilian counterparts. The purpose of this paper is to provide an update and expansion of previous work by Violanti (2007) on homicide-suicide in law enforcement families.

Police-perpetrated homicide-suicide cases were obtained through an online forum dedicated to topics related to domestic violence in police families. A total of 43 police-perpetrated homicide-suicides was identified and reviewed for presence/absence of variables similar to those examined by Violanti (2007), with the addition of new factors. χ2 analyses were performed to test for inter-study differences in proportions on variables of interest.

Results indicated a significantly smaller proportion of homicide-suicide incidents perpetrated by State officers. The remainder of the variable frequencies remained relatively consistent between studies. Of particular importance, domestic violence and divorce/estrangement were salient precursors in these cases.

Data were obtained from an online forum and media publications, which may not be regulated for accuracy and may contain biased data.

The current results, combined with the prior research, underscore the need for prevention programs and departmental policies that: increase the accessibility of mental health services, increase the availability of services for victims of police-involved intimate partner violence, and stress the enforcement of current domestic violence laws.

Results indicate that domestic violence is still a significant problem in law enforcement personnel, with the potential for lethal consequences.

To the authors knowledge, this is only the second study involving a formal analysis of police-involved homicide-suicide cases.

Purpose: The death of a child can elicit enduring and intense parental grief. Additionally, as parents are both confronted with the loss of their child, interpersonal processes come into play. This study aimed to examine the change in reported levels of grief among bereaved parents individually and at a couple-level. The authors examined the differences in grief trajectories between mothers and fathers and whether the reported level of grief of one partner predicts the other partner’s reported level of grief.

Design/methodology/approach: Our longitudinal study included 229 bereaved couples who completed the Inventory of Complicated Grief at 6, 13, and 20 months post-loss.

Findings: A latent growth curve analysis showed that parents reported consistently high average grief levels, mothers reported higher grief levels than fathers, and all parents reported a similar small decline in grief. A cross-lagged panel analysis showed that the grief of one parent affected the grief of the other parent with similar strength. Our results held regardless of the child’s gender and age, but an expected loss was associated with a lower grief level 6 months post-loss and a smaller decline in reported levels of grief.

Originality/value: These findings highlight bereaved parents as a particularly vulnerable population, increase our understanding of change in parental grief over time and of the interdependence of grieving in bereaved couples.

Dyadic multi-dimensionality informs the variation that exists within and between network ties and suggests that ties are not all the same and not all equally strategic. This chapter presents a model of dyadic evolution grounded in dyadic multi-dimensionality and framed within actor-level, dyadic-level, endogenous, and exogenous contexts. These contexts generate both strategic catalysts that motivate network action and bounded agency that may constrain such network action. Assuming the need to navigate within bounded agency, the model highlights three strategic processes that demonstrate how dyadic multi-dimensionality underlies the evolution of strategic network ties.

This conceptual paper examines and evaluates patronage and clientage as a system of interrelated dyadic exchanges between unequals through which goods and services circulate, flowing both up and down through stratified societies. The parties involved may be in different places socially and geographically.

Data are presented for Brazil from the period of the Old Republic beginning in the 1890s, through the end of the Military Dictatorship in mid-1980s, and finally to the present, ending with today’s conditional cash transfer programs. The data are examined against the background of a 15th century book, O Livro da Virtuosa Bemfeituria (The Book of the Virtuous Benefits), written by a Portuguese Prince influential in the expansion and discoveries as a guide for princes and great lords that is used in the paper very much in the way that Adam Smith’s writings are used for most economic behavior today.

There are striking parallels over this long historical period in the behaviors referred to as patronage and clientage that may be conceptualized as an older (traditional) way of ordering the flow of goods and services (distributing them), alternative and parallel to market mechanisms that have, and continue to operate in Brazilian society.

Patronage and clientage are often-misunderstood behaviors, sometimes referred to as corrupt, that alternatively may be explained and understood as part of a still viable and operational socio-cultural system that goes back to a period before the colonization of Brazil.

In Northern Ireland, access to good quality palliative care is an accepted and expected part of modern cancer care. The “Transforming Your Palliative and End of Life Care” programme “supports the design and delivery of coordinated services to enable people with palliative and end of life care needs to have choice in their place of care, greater access to services and improved outcomes at the end of their lives”. The purpose of this autoethnography is to share the author’s lived experience so that it might be used to improve services.

Autoethnography is employed as the research method. The author describes her experience of caring for father over the last six months of his life. She explores the tensions between the different players involved in the care of her father and the family and the internal conflict that developed within her as daughter, carer, care coordinator and doctor. Using multiple data sources, selected data entries were explored through reflexive, dyadic interviews to explore the experience and meaning in each story.

The author found that autoethnography was a powerful tool to give voice to the carer experience. Narration can be a powerful tool for capturing the authentic lived experiences of individuals and families and is a tool seldom utilised in integrated care. This account provides an insight into the author's expectations of integrated palliative care, as a designer and implementer and now an academic in integrated care and concludes with some reflections about the gap between policy and practice in palliative care services in Northern Ireland.

Autoethnography can be a powerful tool for capturing the authentic lived experiences of individuals and families and is an essential component of the quadruple aim.

This study provides a comprehensive framework of adaptation in triadic business relationship settings in the service sector. The framework is based on the industrial network approach (see, e.g., Axelsson & Easton, 1992; Håkansson & Snehota, 1995a). The study describes how adaptations initiate, how they progress, and what the outcomes of these adaptations are. Furthermore, the framework takes into account how adaptations spread in triadic relationship settings. The empirical context is corporate travel management, which is a chain of activities where an industrial enterprise, and its preferred travel agency and service supplier partners combine their resources. The scientific philosophy, on which the knowledge creation is based, is realist ontology. Epistemologically, the study relies on constructionist processes and interpretation. Case studies with in-depth interviews are the main source of data.