Time Use in Forensic Psychiatry: An Exploratory Study of Patients' Time Use at a Swedish Forensic Psychiatric Clinic

Abstract

Individuals who are treated in mandated forensic psychiatry often spend considerable amounts of time in inpatient treatment. In spite of the fact that there is prescriptive literature identifying how to treat offending issues and substance abuse the study found that treatment addressing this was scarce. The present study examined how time was used by mapping patients' time use in 48 randomly selected days. Information on activities from a 24 hour period divided into 15 minutes segments was recorded. In total, 122 different activities were found and they were grouped into 5 categories, sleep and rest, unstructured activities, daily routines, structured activities, and treatment. Average time use in the different categories was 9.07 hours of sleep and rest, 8.60 hours of unstructured activities, 4.42 hours of daily routines, 1.60 hours of structured activities, and 0.31 hours of treatment. No significant differences in time use on treatment between subgroups of individuals such as diagnoses of substance use, psychotic disorders, personality disorder or assessed as high or low violence risk were found.