Realizing a comp rehensive organization of forensic psychiatric care in Flanders: What can we
learn from The Netherlands and Norway?
The forum text titled ‘Urgent need for a real human internment policy’ refers to the rising numbers of internment judgments and their impact on the current organization of forensic mental health care as an important issue to address in Flanders. Due to these rising numbers, persons with an internment measure reside in detention, which isn’t an adequate context to address mental health issues. Additionally, a lot of people that have committed offences, are confronted with mental health problems but they don’t have easy access to (forensic) mental health care. This isn’t defendable from the normality principle that states that this group of persons needs to have equal access to mental health care as the persons without a judicial statute. An integrated perspective on mental health care for persons that have offended is needed, but is currently lacking in Flanders. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to give a first insight in how the forensic psychiatric care should and could be reorganized in Flanders. Therefore, inspiration was gathered from The Netherlands and Norway concerning their organization of forensic mental health care. From the excellence perspective, attention is paid to: (1) the overall framework, (2) the outline of the mental health care organization, (3) the staff policy, and (4) the financial plan. To conclude, recommendations – based on the comparison with The Netherlands and Norway – for an integrated forensic mental health care in Flanders were made.