Developing forensic psychiatry services for the 80s: The linköping experiment

The Linköping Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry has been described as a new model for forensic psychiatry, forensic psychiatry services and psychiatric legal aid. The three years the Center has been operating its new program have been promising and exciting. Contacts with psychiatric clinics, probation agencies, attorneys and legal aid are increasingly frequent. At the same time there is a growing awareness about priorities and purposes. Though we cannot say that we have the final solutions for “whose-side-are-we-on?” questions, it is believed that it is possible to “separate the roles,” at least to some degree, and meaningfully to assign different people to handle different tasks. Finally, as a research center very much oriented to the team field research approach 22 we have had and will continue to have access to an enormous field of challenging social data.