Assaults on staff by psychiatric in-patients. A critical review.

Recent surveys indicate that the frequency of assaults on psychiatric staff by in-patients has increased substantially over the past decade. With patient assaultiveness becoming of greater concern, the need to predict, anticipate, and avoid confrontations with potentially assaultive patients has grown. Regrettably, the vast majority of studies examining the nature, correlates, and predictors of in-patient assaultiveness suffer from methodological problems that limit the validity of their findings.