Violence and self-injury cause anxiety, misery and physical and psychological damage to service users, their carers, the practitioners who look after them, and in some cases, the public at large. This title describes UK and international research and practice in clinical risk management and how it ties in with best practice in risk assessment.

Part 1: The need for change 1. Violence risk assessment: from prediction to understanding - or from what? to why? Part 2: Key areas of practice: 2. Violence risk assessment and management: putting structured professional judgement into practice,3. Working with complicated cases: mental disorder and violence, 4. Managing the risk posed by personality-disordered sex offenders in the community,5. Suicide and self-harm: clinical risk assessment and management using a structured professional judgement approach, Caroline Logan 6. Pathological firesetting by adults,7. Risk management: beyond the individual,Part 3: Key client groups: 8. Risk assessment and management with clients with cognitive impairment, 9. Making delinquency prevention work with children and adolescents,10. Working with women: towards a more gender-sensitive violence risk assessment, 11. Clinical risk assessment and mangement with military personnel and veterans: the tip of a camouflaged iceberg, Part 4: Key practice skills 12. Risk assessment: specialist interviewing skills for forensic practitioners,13. Protective factors for violence risk: bringing balance to risk assessment and management,Postscript: 14. Future directions in clinical risk assessment and management,Afterword

Assessment and management of risk of harm is a serious undertaking, that requires informed and defensible decision-making. Clinicians who wish to access the very best of current knowledge and practice would be well advised to read this book. The topic is subject to incisive critical appraisal by internationally renowned academics and practitioners. Importantly, this book will not leave clinicians wondering what to do with the information: the directions for good practice are clear and workable. The editors are to be congratulated. Mary McMurran, Professor of Personality Disorder Research, University of Nottingham, UK.This book is an ideal complement to the recent edited Routledge text on risk assessment by Randy Otto and Kevin Douglas. Like its companion, this new, and much-needed work has excellent coherence. The editors, both of whom have highly developed connections to leading clinicians, researchers, and administrators,across the world, themselves have contributed fully a third of the content. This means that the book has an evenness and sustained depth so often lacking in ventures of this kind. Essentially, the book helps clinicians of various stripes to offer "structured clinical guidance". The book does a remarkable job of bringing together what we have learned over the past two decades or more about assessing violence and related risks and then telling readers what they need to know about constructing interventions and even institutions that will work. This is well designed book that deserves to be on the desk, not the shelf, of all serious mental health, forensic,and correctional practitioners. Well done!Chris Webster, Professor Emeritus, Psychiatry, University of Toronto; Professor Emeritus, Psychology, Simon Fraser University, Canada.