Stitching the social fabric of society: The effectiveness of a social network intervention in forensic psychiatric care

Forensic psychiatric patients often have complex care needs for which effective multimodal treatment is required. At the same time, evidence-based interventions are scarce and can be improved. A supportive social network has been extensively related to increased mental health and wellbeing and reduced criminal recidivism in general and psychiatric populations. Therefore, the central aim of this dissertation was to examine whether an additive informal social network intervention could improve treatment outcomes among forensic psychiatric outpatients. The findings revealed that social network interventions could be effective in improving supportive social networks and treatment outcomes in psychiatric patients. For forensic psychiatric outpatients, social network interventions in which community volunteers engage in supportive relationship and social activities with outpatients, are feasible and promising in reducing hospitalization duration and criminal behavior. Altogether, the findings in this dissertation indicate that a collaboration paradigm between forensic psychiatric care and informal care could further improve treatment outcomes in patients with complex problems and care needs. However, since patient engagement was challenging, barriers and facilitators should be considered to optimize the implementation of social network interventions for individual patients in forensic psychiatric care. We hope that this research will encourage clinicians to incorporate informal social network interventions into treatment programs and guide policy makers. Furthermore, we emphasize that future research is needed to determine which patients benefit from which types of social network interventions to better understand and optimize the effectiveness of these interventions in forensic psychiatric care.