The effectiveness of schema therapy in offenders with intellectual disabilities: a case series design

ABSTRACT

Background

In forensic settings, patients with intellectual disabilities are overrepresented. A relative novel treatment approach for this population is schema therapy. The goals of schema therapy for offenders with intellectual disabilities are to reduce maladaptive emotional states and to reinforce healthy emotional states and enhancing the patient's ability to ask for help. No studies are examining the effectiveness of this approach.

Method

We examined the effectiveness of Schema Therapy for offenders with intellectual disabilities (ST-ID) in terms of emotional states, psychological complaints, and violence risk in six participants.

Results

Reliable change analyses showed significant improvements in emotional states and certain psychological complaints.

Conclusions

While many questions remain about the effectiveness of ST-ID, our study shows that offenders with ID can benefit from this psychological treatment.

KEYWORDS:

• Schema therapy
• offenders
• intellectual disability
• effectiveness
• case series

Acknowledgements

We kindly thank all patients and therapists for their time and effort spent on this study and the directors of de Rooyse Wissel and Trajectum for their support and resources.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Anke de Klerk: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

Marije Keulen-de Vos: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

Jill Lobbestael: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Writing – review & editing.

Notes

1 The authors are aware that the term “offenders” may have different meanings in different countries. For the purpose of this article, the term “offenders” refers to all types of patients who have histories of criminal behaviour and receive mandated care.

2 For the SMI-F and SCL-90-R, we used reliability coefficients obtained from a SMI-F validation study (Maassen, 2019) and a comparable SCL-90-R study (Kellett et al., 1999).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.