Professional and Therapeutic Boundaries in Forensic Mental Health Practice

Anne Aiyegbusi, Gillian Kelly

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781849051392
• eBook ISBN: 9780857003287
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Forensic Psychology
• Index: Psychology

People who use forensic mental health services are defined by the fact that they have violated boundaries, often in many ways. For clinicians employed to work therapeutically with this client group however, the capacity to initiate and maintain boundaries is critical to safety as well as to good treatment outcomes.

This book provides a thorough introduction to the subject of professional and therapeutic boundaries and their particular complexities within forensic mental health settings. The contributors, all experts in their respective fields, address the challenges of establishing working boundaries within forensic mental health services from multiple perspectives. They explore the ways in which boundaries can be initiated and maintained in different areas of forensic mental health work, including in psychotherapy, mental health nursing, arts therapies, forensic psychiatry and family therapy, and when working with different client groups, including children and adolescents, offenders with severe personality disorders in high security settings and sex offenders. Consideration is also given to boundaries and homicide, maternal boundary violations and boundaries in a forensic learning disability service.

This authoritative, interdisciplinary resource will support all forensic mental health practitioners in this crucial aspect of their work.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 What the Eye Doesn’t See: Relationships, Boundaries and Forensic Mental Health
• Chapter 2 The Patient’s Experience of Professional Abuse in the Psychological Therapies
• Chapter 3 Boundary Violations: Are Transgressing Professionals Beyond Help?
• Chapter 4 Therapy in Perversity: Seduction, Destruction and Keeping Balance
• Chapter 5 Groupwork for Offence Perpetrators with a History of Boundary Violation in the Hospital Setting
• Chapter 6 Moving with the Patient: Boundary Phenomena in Forensic Dramatherapy
• Chapter 7 Discovering Harmony: Music Therapy in Forensic Settings
• Chapter 8 Working with Families in Forensic Settings: A Systemic Perspective on Boundaries
• Chapter 9 Boundaries in Forensic Mental Health Nursing: Set in Stone or Shifting Sands?
• Chapter 10 Boundaries and Desire in Forensic Mental Health Nursing
• Chapter 11 Boundaries and Boundary Violations in the Nurse–Patient Relationship with People Diagnosed with Personality Disorders in DSPD and WEMSS: Some Findings from a Mixed Methods Research Study
• Chapter 12 Boundary Violations in Medium Security
• Chapter 13 Therapeutic Boundaries in Working with Young People in an NHS Secure Adolescent Forensic Unit
• Chapter 14 Boundary Transgressions as a Tool for Reparation within Therapeutic Relationships
• Chapter 15 Boundaries and Borderline Personality Disorder
• Chapter 16 Boundaries and Working with Serious Offenders who also have Severe Personality Disorders in a High-Security Setting
• Chapter 17 Mothering on the Edge: Boundary Failures in Maternal Care
• Chapter 18 Boundary Matters in a Forensic Learning Disability Service
• Chapter 19 ‘Dangerous Liaisons’: Close Encounters of the Unboundaried Kind
• Chapter 20 Neither Here nor There, not one Thing or Another: The Use of a Reflective Practice Group to Understand the Distortion of a Boundary
• Chapter 21 Boundaries and Homicide
• Contributors