Background: The management of aggressive or acutely disturbed people is a subject of concern for both criminal justice and health care professionals. In recognition of this, the NHS National R & D Programme for Forensic Mental Health has provided funding for a one-year project to create, disseminate and survey a clearly classified register of randomised controlled trials relevant to the management of aggressive or violent behaviour.

Methods: Methodical searches of AMED, ASLIB Index to Theses, ASSIA, Biological Abstracts, Brainwave, British Nursing Index, Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, Criminal Justice Abstracts, Dissertations Abstracts, EMBASE, GPO, Health-CD, International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, IPA, ISTP, MEDLINE, NCCAN, NCJRS, Pascal, PAIS, PsycLIT, Sociological Abstracts and SPECTR were carried out. Specialist bibliographies were also searched for relevant citations. AUSTROM and AUSThealth are still to be searched. The searches have, so far, identified some 21,000 records 2200 of which were relevant to the project. These were coded by participant problem group. Hard copies of the 300+ trials considered high priority (i.e. where participants were either seriously aggressive or aggressive and psychotic) have been obtained and surveyed for source of study, methodology, intervention, loss to follow-up and outcome.

Results: The results of this survey will be presented. All citations identified by the project will be made available through either the Cochrane or Campbell Collaborations.