Schizophrenia and violence: accepting and forsaking

Violence remains highly problematic for women. Women diagnosed with schizophrenia are at particularly high risk for numerous types of violence. Many of these women receive services in the community through mental health case managers. These case managers have developed ongoing and close relationships with women, and are often the front-line service providers to assist them in negotiating with physical, mental, and social service agencies. This interpretive phenomenological study examined the perspective of mental health case managers to better understand how they cope with the intersection of violence with a diagnosis of schizophrenia among their clientele. Accepting and forsaking was a theme developed to describe how case managers gradually accepted violence in the lives of women with schizophrenia, and how this acceptance was eventually coupled with forsaking hope for a reduction or elimination of violence in women's lives.