Studies into work carried out by male caregivers in a care environment in which male patients and male caregivers constitute a majority are lacking. The purpose of this study was to illuminate the experiences of male caregivers in providing care for patients in forensic psychiatric care. The study has a qualitative design and data were constituted by interviews with six male caregivers at a clinic of forensic psychiatry in a town in central Sweden. The method of analysis chosen was latent content analysis. The results consist of four themes: Activities as a component of care, Social training as the basis of care, Feelings of powerlessness and Seeing the complete person. The experience that comes out most distinctly in the descriptions given by caregivers involves performing activities together with the patients. The activities had different significances and these contribute to creating a more secure care relationship, in which the boundaries between personnel and patients become less clear. Physical activities contribute to recreating the patient's health. Social training appears as a component of the care in which the significance of rules and routines in the operations was integrated. Feelings of powerlessness arise when the caregivers do not experience that the care given on the ward contributes to recreating health for the patients. Seeing the complete person behind the crime constitutes the themes that can be said to summarize the meaning of the work carried out by male caregivers.
The aim of the study was to investigate how starting to use dialectical behavioural therapy (DBT) in the work with young self-harming women showing symptoms of borderline personality disorder affected the psychiatric professionals (n = 22) experience of occupational stress and levels of professional burnout. The study was carried out in relation to an 18-month clinical psychiatric development project, and used a mix of quantitative and qualitative research methods [a burnout inventory, the Maslach burnout inventory-General Survey (MBI-GS), free format questionnaires and group interviews]. The result confirms previous reports that psychiatric health professionals experience treatment of self-harming patients as very stressful. DBT was seen as stressful in terms of learning demands, but decreased the experience of stress in the actual treatment of the patients. The teamwork and supervision were felt to be supportive, as was one particular facet of DBT, namely mindfulness training which some therapists felt also improved their handling of other work stressors not related to DBT. The inventory for professional burnout, the MBI-GS, showed no significant changes over the 18-month period, although there was a tendency for increased burnout levels at the 6-month assessment, which had returned to baseline levels at 18 months.