Occupational Therapy News OTNews March 2020 | Page 20

FEATURE FORENSIC SERVICES
Personal choice
and social inclusion
Jessica Oglethorpe looks at a recent project to improve social inclusion in an
inpatient forensic mental health service, by encouraging service users to engage in the
election process, share their views and stage a ‘mock election’
O
n 12 December 2019, the UK held a
general election, which gave people in
every part of the country the opportunity
to select their Member of Parliament
(MP). The elected person then represents a local area
(constituency) in the House of Commons for up to five
years (www.parliament.uk/about/how/elections-and-
voting/general/).
In the lead up to the election, I set about
implementing a service-wide intervention centred
around this event within a forensic mental health unit
in South London.
The unit consists of three medium-secure wards –
two male and one female – and one male low-secure
ward.
I am one of four occupational therapists in the
service, working with people with severe relapsing-
20 OTnews March 2020
remitting mental illness, who have had contact with the
criminal justice system. This means that many of them
are detained under restrictive sections of the Mental
Health Act (MHA), such as Section 37/41.
Service users under forensic sections are not
permitted to vote by law (Rees and Reed 2016),
however, the wider purpose of the intervention was
to promote engagement with the socio-political
environment and to explore aspects of empowerment
and choice making.
Social Inclusion and forensic inpatient
mental health
As an occupational therapist working in this setting,
I was interested in promoting engagement with the
election because of how it can be linked to recovery
and social inclusion.