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.

The primary focus of this volume is to support practice by individuals and teams that deal directly either with individuals diagnosed with mental disorder or with those whose presentation causes the same dilemmas for practitioners. The chapters draw on experience gained across a wide spectrum of settings: within the NHS, the National Offender Management Services (NOMS) and the wider criminal justice services, as well as various services for children, young people and their families. The subject matter of this text covers anti social, offending and challenging behaviors: in particular behaviors that create unusual levels of anxiety in practitioners or the public. Valuable insights are offered, with examples, into ways of thinking about these problems and practical guidance is offered on the way professional teams and the individuals within them can develop and maintain effective work. While not explicitly focused on those identified as having a personality disorder, the material concerns individuals with psychological difficulties that are pervasive, enduring and which have a particularly intrusive impact on caring staff members working with them.