Adolescent Forensic Psychiatry PDF

Preface and acknowledgements

Children and teenagers make up a quarter of the total population of the UK.We know that 50% of all offenders are under the age of 21 years and that rates of mental health problems are particularly high in children and young people who offend.

Forensic mental health encompasses the assessment and treatment of those who are both mentally disordered or whose behaviours have led or could lead to offending. Increasingly the specialism of forensic mental health has also involved direct work with victims.Traditionally, child and adolescent mental health practitioners have had to work as generalists but their workload often includes forensic work.

Mental illness among young offenders has become an ever-increasing concern. Diverse political and policy concerns range from those who are primarily interested in saving young people to those who are primarily interested in saving the public from young offenders. Public health policy has long recognized the government's obligation to attend to the basic health needs of prisoners and the importance of meeting the overall health, including mental health, needs of children.

Services surrounding the assessment and treatment of children and young people within forensic mental health services are influenced by professionals in many areas. People within those areas are often obligated to offer opinions on the reasons why children and young people break the law and what should be done with them. Changes in the law regarding culpability and capacity of children raise issues of whether to criminalize and punish or care and educate. The development of services, the methods of assessment and treatment of children and young people and issues surrounding future risk and rehabilitation are therefore central to the content of this book.

The variety of contributors reflects the mosaic of professionals that children and young people may meet, should they enter the criminal justice and/or social care system. In Part 1, assessment practices including needs assessment and assessment of risk are described. Child influences on psychopathology and an introduction to some major disorders and clinical syndromes are presented in Parts 2 and 3 respectively. Part 4 examines offenders and their offending behaviour. The core types of treatments currently available are outlined in Part 5. Part 6 describes the delivery of services. In Part 7, legal, social and healthcare systems and agencies are examined.

Whilst we hope this book will be of special interest to those people working with children and young people in secure care, it will also be of interest to people working with all looked-after children. It also provides a context in which to view secure care provision of adults. It will be of value to all those involved in the development of the needs of children and adolescents within educational, social, mental health and criminal justice services.

We acknowledge the time, patience and expertise given so generously by the authors and we thank them. Authors have written their contributions from their own unique and respected perspectives and as such this book will offer a wide range of comprehensive knowledge and opinion. Any overlap we believe captures the current state of both knowledge and opinion in this developing and exciting new field of mental health, juvenile justice work.

We wish to express a great debt of thanks to Paul Tarbuck, Service Director of Bolton, Salford and Trafford Mental Health Trust; James Millington and Nathan Whittle for their editorial assistance and for the support of mentors and pioneers in the field; Carol Sheldrick; Professor Pamela Taylor; Professor John Gunn; Mrs Dorothy Tonak; Joe Erulkar; and the late Barbara Kahan. We also wish to thank Deborah Rothwell, Nicola Tattersall, Iram Farooq and Hazel Flanagan for all the secretarial support they have provided in their own time.