ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to introduce the ideas based on experience in the mental health field and inpatient psychiatric hospitals in particular. The public health prevention model of violence conceptualises it across three domains: institutional, structural, and direct. The broader lens for understanding violence demands shifts in organisational and clinical paradigms to integrate this understanding into the design of inpatient programmes to treat violence and trauma. Trauma-informed, person-centred, recovery-focused models of care seek to re-establish those prosocial means of connection by incorporating into traditional treatment modalities, practices that encourage self-empowerment and accountability. Violence begets the trauma response, which, in the absence of intervention or treatment, often begets more violence, across the institutional, structural, and direct realms. The restorative justice approach to violent behaviour has tremendous implications for working with patients and for the staff that work in inpatient psychiatric hospitals. Violent incidents on psychiatric inpatient units often erupt in a response to a perceived threat. Safety addresses trauma and ameliorating violence.
