Assaultive eye injury and enucleation.

An especially dangerous behavior observed in some forensic and security hospital populations is assaultive eye gouging. Although a number of case reports in the literature concern auto-enucleation, gouging out the eyes of another is virtually unmentioned. We present a case series of eye gougers (n = 10) gathered through clinical contributions from several forensic populations in the United States and Russia. Four subjects were psychotic during the eye-gouging episode, one was only mentally retarded, and five, who were neither psychotic nor retarded, deliberately injured victims' eyes during acts of extreme sexual violence.