This book is aimed at all practitioners working in healthcare and criminal justice community settings with individuals displaying antisocial, offending, and challenging behaviours, at times complicated by severe mental disorders. Despite risk assessment policies and procedures, we all know how disorientated we can feel when trying to make sense of what is going on in the course of our work. Contributors to this book describe familiar anxiety-provoking situations. Most importantly, they illustrate ideas and perspectives that can help you to rediscover meaning and purpose in your roles and tasks, with the ultimate objective of enabling service-users to manage more effectively the emotional turbulence that invariably lies behind their challenging behaviours.

Suitable for practitioners working in healthcare and criminal justice community settings with individuals displaying antisocial, offending, and challenging behaviours, at times complicated by severe mental disorders, this book describes familiar anxiety-provoking situations.

This book sets out to establish a role for psychoanalytic understanding in contemporary psychiatric services, particularly at the interface of psychiatry and the criminal justice system ? (it) is a good and thought-provoking book and its subject matter is important. Receptive clinicians will find it useful in their daily clinical practice within existing services. Those involved in service development, whether in-patient or community-based, would do well to consider it too. Tom Clark Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist, British Journal of Psychotherapy