The search for integrated paradigms of care for people with mental illness who offend: the enabling personality of Eric Broekaert

Acknowledgements

The first author of this paper will always remember the encounter with Eric when the author was a PhD student in criminology. At a crucial time in the author’s studies, a time of doubt when the author was searching for the “right” paradigm for the participatory study on tailored drug prevention and treatment with adolescents with a disability (Vander Laenen, 2011), the author turned to Eric Broekaert for advice. Before we met, he had told the author that he could spare 30 minutes of his time. When the author left his office, after more than one and a half hours, he had not provided the author with the “right answer” – instead, he had asked the author the right questions that gave the author the confidence to finish PhD. In hindsight, what Eric did during this meeting was grounded in the existential-phenomenological paradigm: “Man, as a subjective being with his own story, is situated in the meeting with the other, in the heart of existence” (Broekaert et al., 2004, p. 208). The second author of this paper wishes to honour Eric as an open-minded and enabling friend and colleague whose inspiration and style laid the foundations for fascinating and always inspiring human encounters across disciplines. This resulted in the development of a large five-year multidisciplinary project called “Developing multidisciplinary strengths-based strategies for mentally ill offenders” in which colleagues from three university faculties are involved (Vander Beken et al., 2016). Along with Kurt Audenaert of the Faculty of Medicine and the author, Eric was one of the main promoters of this project. The author will never forget the day in 2014 when the authors successfully defended the author’s proposal at the University Research Council and received the news that the authors had been selected for funding. Eric was delighted and enormously proud. This was not because he had just been awarded a large and prestigious grant but because, once again, he had managed to be the enabler of a process of multidisciplinary encounters and a study with and about people that matter.