Exploring Graduated Court Diversion Clients\u27 Experience of Psychotherapy in Their Community Reintegration

Court Diversion Program (CDP) seeks to reduce the criminalization and reoffending among people living with mental illness to ensure their community reintegration (Schneider, 2010). The complex nature of achieving this goal calls for a comprehensive strategy, which requires a collaborative effort of legal, health care, and allied professionals including psychotherapists. However, because most CDP clients frequently receive medication treatment, not much is known about how CDP clients find psychotherapy services even though psychotherapy is effective for addressing mental illnesses and offending behaviors (Feingold & Fox, 2018; Feucht & Holt, 2016), To gain more insight into the issue, this study applied the postmodern framework and adopted a comparative case study design to explore the experiences of 5 CDP clients who received psychotherapy as part of their treatment with other 5 CDP clients who received pharmacotherapy treatment. Specifically, this research investigated why the clients chose their preferred treatment, how they experienced their participation in this form of treatment, and the role their treatment modality played in their community reintegration after encountering the criminal justice system. The researcher used qualitative interview techniques to collect data from the 10 participants who were living in the City of Toronto. Data were analyzed for patterns that revealed group differences in the experience and outcomes of these treatments