This presentation addresses the growing challenge of caring for highly vulnerable individuals within forensic mental health systems shaped by global social forces, cultural diversity, and biological complexity. Across many jurisdictions, forensic populations disproportionately include people from migrant, refugee, and minoritised backgrounds, with high rates of neurodevelopmental conditions, trauma-related disorders, affective illness, and significant physical health comorbidity. These intersecting vulnerabilities highlight the limitations of narrowly biomedical or risk-dominated models and underline the continued relevance of social psychiatry in contemporary forensic practice.
Drawing on clinical and medico-legal experience in secure forensic settings, the presentation conceptualises recovery as a culturally embedded, socially situated, and biologically mediated process rather than a uniform or purely symptom-based outcome. It explores how culturally shaped explanatory models of distress, spirituality, family and community roles, and embodied expressions of suffering—often communicated through somatic symptoms, emotional dysregulation, or behavioural disturbance—influence pathways into forensic care, engagement with treatment, and perceived risk.
The presentation integrates emerging evidence from global mental health and psychopharmacology, including adjunctive approaches to depression treatment and culturally patterned behavioural stressors such as digital overuse, sleep disturbance, and metabolic vulnerability. These factors are examined as culturally mediated expressions of distress that intersect with trauma, deprivation, and institutionalisation in forensic populations, with particular relevance for neurodivergent individuals and those from Global South or diasporic backgrounds.
Clinical examples illustrate how culturally reductive approaches to diagnosis and risk assessment may contribute to diagnostic overshadowing, stigma, and prolonged detention. In contrast, transcultural formulations that integrate social context, embodied biology, and narrative meaning support more accurate and humane medico-legal reasoning, informing assessments of capacity, culpability, fitness to plead, sentencing, hospital transfer, and discharge planning.
Situated within a Global Social Psychiatry framework and grounded in the cultural context of Marrakech and the wider Global South, this presentation advocates for a recovery-oriented forensic model that reconciles cultural humility, biological complexity, and justice. Such an approach offers a clinically relevant, ethically grounded, and globally informed pathway for caring for the most vulnerable individuals within forensic mental health systems worldwide.
Dr Deniz Al Tawalbeh & Dr Hasanen Al-Taiar
Leave a Reply