The Therapeutic Milieu Under Fire: Security and Insecurity in Forensic Mental Health (Forensic Focus)

Author: John AdlamPublisher: Jessica Kingsley PubPaperback:ISBN 10: 1849052581ISBN 13: 978-1849052580This book offers fresh, original and stimulating approaches to engagement with individuals who have been multiply excluded from society and who present challenges to traditional psychiatric models of assessment and treatment. It brings to life the thinking of those working on the frontline in an increasingly difficult environment, and draws together the central themes in working with highly complex and disturbed individuals while retaining psychodynamic understanding of their histories and current circumstances. It offers readers a better understanding of the factors that help and hinder the development and maintenance of effective therapeutic relationships with the socially marginalised, dealing with social exclusion and its consequences in a variety of different treatment settings. Offering a resource of information and clinical insight, this book is essential reading for psychiatrists and psychological therapists, and will also be of interest to frontline workers including doctors, nurses and social workers. This series takes the field of Forensic Psychotherapy as its focal point, offering a forum for the presentation of theoretical and clinical issues. It embraces such influential neighbouring disciplines as language, law, literature, criminology, ethics and philosophy, as well as psychiatry and psychology, its established progenitors. Review This book contains a brilliant and moving series of descriptions and analyses of the special difficulties encountered by mental health professionals who attempt to help our society solve one of the most complex, dangerous and destructive problems it faces...if we are to improve our ability to optimize, rather than cripple, the institutions and professionals to whom we have delegated the responsibility to treat mentally disturbed violent offenders, then the legislators, and the voters who elect the legislators, will need to be informed about what helps and what hinders them from performing that task. That is what this book describes and explains in elegant detail, and that is why I hope it will have as wide a readership as possible. Author: James Gilligan, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, New York University About the Author Dr Anne Aiyegbusi is Deputy Director of Nursing, Specialist and Forensic Services within West London Mental Health NHS Trust. She has worked as a nurse in forensic mental health services for many years and is interested in integrating forensic psychotherapy with the nursing role. Additionally, she is interested in attachment theory and its application within forensic services.