Abstract
Knowledge on user experiences from mentally disordered offenders (MDOs) is still limited in a Danish context, especially regarding recovery from offences, severe mental illness, long-term admissions and often involuntarily contact with hospital psychiatry. The study is based on 34 semi-structured interviews with nine forensic patients exploring their experiences with personal recovery processes. The MDOs point out a significant number of elements and factors enhancing, supporting and limiting personal recovery processes. Long-term recovery processes for MDOs involve coming to terms with mental disorders as well as offences. Working with offender recovery implies addressing and understanding the index offence leading to psychiatric measurement as well as addressing risk and prevention of future crime. This coming to terms is an individual and deeply personal process and it often involves several and changing narratives. According to the informants, professionals play a crucial role in supporting recovery processes and maintaining hope and optimism over time. MDOs experience structural barriers limiting recovery potential, especially stigma or limited areas of participation. It is important not to focus solely on personal recovery as a one-dimensional individual process or responsibility, but as a process also marked by structural and organisational challenges.
Highlights
The informants point towards a number of elements supporting and enhancing personal recovery processes:
mentally disordered offenders (MDOs) point out a large number of elements and factors supporting, enhancing or limiting their personal recovery processes
Long-term recovery processes for mentally disordered offenders involve coming to terms with mental disorders as well as offences
Summary
Principles of recovery are central in today’s mental health services, and patients are supposed to receive recovery-oriented care and treatment, focusing on hope, possibilities and empowerment in their lives. This focus is reflected in a number of Danish policy papers as well as activities and projects such as user-controlled admissions, employment of peer workers, recovery schools, implementation of Shared Decision Making, and focus on the patients’. The strategic aim of recovery orientation includes patients under restraint according to the Danish Mental Health Act as well as mentally disordered offenders with placement or treatment orders. Mental health professionals often express bewilderment and perplexity regarding how to support individual recovery processes and how to act in practice as coaches rather than experts [7,8]
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