Resistance and challenge: competing accounts in aftercare monitoring

This article explores a candidate example of competing accounts of aftercare under supervision of a discharged forensic patient and worker in one part of the UK. It is taken from a study involving 59 in-depth interviews with patients and their workers to investigate community return after detention in forensic psychiatric facilities. Fear of mental illness and associated dangerousness are embodied in discourses surrounding the forensic patient. In living with deviant labels and seeking to establish independence from the psychiatric system patients' talk demonstrates nascent identity work in an attempt to resist alternative dominant discourses. Workers however deploy occupational knowledge of risk and associated monitoring as the basis for claims of safe aftercare. Both patient and worker accounts are reflexively aware of competing versions and seek to portray the provision of aftercare monitoring in self-interested ways. Aftercare monitoring and supervision may ostensibly be about integration and rehabilitation but as this study shows risk is an ever-present concern forming an important backdrop to the attempts of patients to forge new identities and the normalising ideologies of those working with them.