Realizing a comprehensive 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.