Rehabilitation in Forensic Psychiatry – in the area of conflict between the individual, organization and society

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Werner Vogd
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research ; Sociological Theory
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 406931463

Forensic psychiatric care aims on the rehabilitation of mentally ill offenders and is mainly carried out in closed psychiatric hospitals. Due to total or partial exemption from criminal responsibility, treatment focuses not on the punishment of the culprit but on medical treatment of the mentally ill. Not least because of the potential dangerousness of the clients, the institutions are faced with conflicting priorities of different functional systems (e.g. legal, political, economic and medical system). Especially in the context of the rehabilitation of the inmates, understood as the highly organized effort to make a person socially acceptable again, the strong interrelatedness of the individual, the organization and the society becomes obvious. “Transformations” of an inmate’s behaviour not only occurs because of intentional therapeutic treatment, but to a high degree in consequence of the longstanding socialisation in a highly restricted and closed setting. So far the question of how rehabilitation can be realised under the circumstances of a highly organized treatment and which socializing “normality” arises in such an organization remains open.For profound findings in this regard, a comparative reconstruction of the social practices of several forensic psychiatric clinics is to be realized in a qualitative research design. The method of Contextural Analysis, which was developed especially for organizational settings, allows for an adequate reconstruction of such highly paradox institutions. Past approaches tended to dissolve contradictories and inconsistencies either by a sociological or biological reductionism. The sampling also takes county-specific differences of the treatment system into account. Furthermore, all the different groups involved in the therapeutic process (patients, caretakers, therapists, etc.) are considered in order to reconstruct rehabilitation and (milieu-) therapy as an organized practice. For the first time it will be systematically elaborated, which specific demands and tensions are to be dealt with on different levels and by different groups of persons - and how they are arranged in a practicable way in every day practice.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants