The Relationship Between Treatment Alliance, Social Climate, and Treatment Readiness in Long-Term Forensic Psychiatric Care: An Explorative Study

For patients in long-term forensic psychiatric care (LFPC), a continuous search for treatment possibilities remains important. An alternative viewpoint to these patients as being untreatable is considering them having low treatment readiness. Treatment readiness incorporates internal client-specific factors as well as factors in the therapeutic situation. In the therapeutic situation both social climate and therapeutic alliance are of positive influence on treatment outcome. In this explorative study of 38 male patients in Dutch LFPC, we found correlations with strong (Bayesian) evidence between internal factors of treatment readiness, treatment alliance, and “Therapeutic Hold,” which is a subscale of social climate. In a Bayesian linear regression analysis, however, therapeutic hold seemed to be the only strong predictor of internal treatment readiness. These results give way to further research into the factors specifically contributing to the found correlations, in order to create opportunities to enlarge treatment readiness for patients in forensic care.