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Introduction
Forensic mental health services represent the interface between the criminal justice and mental health systems, providing assessment and treatment for individuals with both mental illness and offending histories. Practitioners working in this area are required to strike a balance between their dual responsibilities of providing care and treatment for mentally disordered offenders while protecting the wider community. However, in practice there is often disagreement about the weight that should be given to criminogenic (dynamic risk factors) and mental health issues, which may be viewed as separate entities and given varying emphases by different professional disciplines ([4] Davies et al. , 2006). In addition to the challenges in balancing risk and care paradigms and the lack of an overarching theoretical framework for integrating the multiple perspectives within forensic mental health teams can be an obstacle to developing cohesive conceptualizations of mentally disordered offenders and their core rehabilitation needs.
What is required is a shared, comprehensive practice framework that can assist practitioners to integrate the dual roles of patient treatment and community protection and a range of assessment information into a unified understanding of mentally disordered offenders. It has been proposed that an augmented form of the Good Lives Model (GLM), a strength-based approach to offender rehabilitation[1] , has the potential to fill the current void in forensic mental health ([15] Robertson et al. , 2011). The focus of this paper is therefore the application of the GLM with mentally disordered offenders and the development of a GLM tool kit to guide and focus practitioners in their use of this new approach.
I will first summarize the GLM of offender rehabilitation before outlining the augmented form of the GLM that was developed for use with mentally disordered offenders. Next, I will briefly outline the context and rationale for the development of the GLM toolkit for mentally disordered offenders. Then I will present the GLM tool kit for mentally disordered offenders and demonstrate the use of each tool with a case example. Finally, the potential benefits of the tool kit in forensic mental health practice will be discussed along with the limitations of the current research.
The GLM
The GLM is a comprehensive theory of offender rehabilitation that focuses on promoting individuals' important personal goals while...