Call for paper - Special Issues

Violence is a widespread phenomenon that involves a multiplicity of contexts, people of all ages, genders and socio-cultural statuses: furthermore, it has a great influence on cognitive, emotional and biological processes.

Many aspects of violence such as gender-based violence and child abuse have already been extensively investigated in psychology. However, an approach to violence that views it as a broader act in which every element of the system finds its place is often overlooked by psychotherapists. In particular, the premises derived from violence capable of grasping the violent process as a whole are often left at the margins of research and clinical practice. In particular, actors (professionals, users, etc.) involved in the violent process still face social dilemmas, have to make crucial decisions, find positioning within a context that is not always clear, and discuss ethical issues.

Addressing the issue of violence from a clinical and therapeutic point of view means knowing how to embrace relational complexity, stepping out of linear roles and multiplying points of view to understand the phenomenon, abandoning punctual positions that risk to have iatrogenic effects. Having established that violence should be condemned from an ethical point of view and punished from a legal point of view, clinicians are left with the challenge of treating it, from prevention to treatment, both from an individual as well as from a systemic point of view, remembering that violent acts are often epiphenomena of dysfunctional histories, suffering and/or pathology. What do we disregard? How can we act earlier and how can we de-amplify a growing social process?

To fill this gap, we would like to propose a special issue focused on violence in different personal and mental health services. Specifically, we aim to shed light on the biggest dilemmas affecting the field of violent processes today and on how they affect the mind. For example, we aim to deal with issues such as the management, treatment and taking care of violent processes on users and practitioners in different mental health contexts such as psychiatry departments, counseling centers, residential and semi-residential therapeutic communities, psycho-social centers, etc... With respect to these contexts, we aim to analyze how violence is detected, cured and healed, crossing the thin boundary between ethical and legal perspectives and going beyond the double bind generated by having to act in protection and being therapeutic. Possible contributions to this special issue involve the following themes:

-The dilemma faced by health care personnel between respecting the patient's decision-making preferences and their deontological duty to preserve the patient's mental and physical integrity (TSO, tube)

-the dilemma of health care personnel working with seemingly contradictory narratives conveyed by the different actors in the violent process

-the therapist's dilemma between the therapeutic path made with the patient on the one side and compliance with legal-deontological norms on the other side

-the dilemma experienced by the patient who perpetrated the violence between asking for help and changing his relational patterns

-the dilemma of children and parents who are not taken into account in out-of-home placement processes

-the dilemma of the treatment system, which must know how to intervene in a complex way, avoiding iatrogenic causes that may instead lead to a violent escalation