Strength- and recovery-based approaches in forensic mental health in late modernity: Increasingly incorporating a human rights angle?

Abstract

Forensic mental health care is situated across both criminal justice and healthcare systems and is subject to political, cultural, legal and economic shifts in these contexts. The implementation of strength- and recovery-based models of care should be understood in light of these social and structural processes. Drawing on novel empirical fieldwork and the extant literature, we argue that full realisation of strength- and recovery-based principles is at odds with aspects of late modern social control. Not wholly compatible, we highlight how concepts of empowerment, autonomy, identity and connectedness can unhelpfully rub-up against the concepts of punitiveness, otherness and risk management. Conceptually this is problematic, but in frontline forensic psychiatry settings, this has real lived-experience detrimental effects for patients – as our data demonstrate. To address this, a human rights approach might be fruitful. Grounding arguments for strength- and recovery-based principles in the heuristic framework of human rights can offer a set of common values to stimulate reform in forensic mental healthcare. The right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms offers a particularly promising, robust and well-defined framework for these future changes – as we outline.