Patients with mental illness or substance use disorder who committed a crime can be treated in forensic psychiatry in Germany if the offence is related to their disorder. This treatment is time-consuming and expensive and affects human rights of patients to a large extend. Therefore, therapeutic concepts and treatment organization shall be guided by evidence based practices at their latest state of the art. Unfortunately, there does exist a lack of even basic information about the population of forensic mental health patients in Germany. Our current project, funded by the local Damp-Stiftung, is planned as a pilot for a larger, nationwide main study. Over a period of 12 month the planned research instruments and processes shall be examined for their feasibility and usability and adapted, if necessary. Therefore, a small scale data collection is planned with six forensic mental health hospitals in the federal states of Mecklenburg-Pommerania, Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg and Baden-Wurttemberg. All of these hospitals treat forensic mental health patients who had no or diminished criminal responsibility due to a severe mental illness and therefore, were convicted due to § 63 StGB of the German Penal Code (Strafgesetzbuch, StGB). This procedure directly contributes to the further development of evidence based treatment and quality assurance of this demanding patient population.

You can find the survey manual of the pilot study here.