Positivity in Captivity: A Positive Psychology Approach to Forensic Healthcare Work [PhD Project]
Working with forensic patients is highly demanding and sometimes compared to playing in the champions league of mental health care. Forensic patients have committed violent offenses and often exhibit behavioural problems within the institution, causing stress for Forensic Healthcare Workers (FHWs), thereby negatively affecting their well-being and ultimately leading to illness or leaving their job. This results in personnel shortages, which negatively affect the safety and quality of care.
Although it is tempting to study FHWs well-being from a deficit-based approach, a one-sided focus on problem analysis can be demoralizing and professional functioning consists of more than just surviving stressful situations. When organizations only focus on what needs to be ‘fixed’ they may end up with employees who lose connection with what goes well. Therefore, it is important to also focus on resources for the promotion of health and well-being. In this project we adopt a Positive Psychological (PP) perspective, focusing on amplifying positive experiences and positive traits of FHWs with the overall aim to improve their health and well-being and the adaptiveness of the organization (reducing personnel shortages).
We aim to integrate theories from forensic psychiatry and positive organizational psychology and investigate to what extent a positive approach towards patient treatment influences not only the well-being of patients, but also that of FHWs.
Team composition
- Marianne van Woerkom is an associate professor at Tilburg University and a part-time full professor on the chair Positive Organizational Psychology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She has extensive experience in applying positive psychology to the context of work organizations and in setting up field experiments with positive and strengths-based interventions in various organizations.
- Elien De Caluwé is an assistant professor at Tilburg University and has expertise in clinical, personality and forensic psychology.
- Stefan Bogaerts is a full professor of developmental psychopathology and forensic psychology at Tilburg University and is affiliated with Fivoor Science and Treatment Innovation.
Cross-cutting themes
The Herbert Simon Research Institute for Health, Well-being, and Adaptiveness is a research center devoted to carrying out excellent, state of the art research in order to contribute to healthy and resilient people. We have selected three themes, which involve the collaboration between various Departments and address actual themes in need of both fundamental and applied research.