The unique challenges faced by mental health service workers who engage with patients exhibiting violent or self-harmful behaviour is a growing concern. Service-users and practitioners exposed to these types of behaviours are often themselves the sufferers of anxiety, misery, and serious injury. Providers and commissioners alike have a shared interest in working more effectively to resolve this increasingly complex issue.

Self-Harm and Violence: Towards Best Practice in Managing Risk in Mental Health Services sets out for the first time to examine and explore the most effective clinical practice techniques relating to the management of risk in mental health care settings. The volume's contributors, many of whom were members of the original national advisory group which drew up the Department of Health's 2007 Best Practice in Managing Risk guidelines, are all leading experts in their respective fields. The implementation of Best Practice into a variety of 'real world' clinical settings sheds important new light on the effectiveness of various risk management techniques.

Self-Harm and Violence represents a state-of-the-art assessment of our knowledge and understanding of best practice in the management of risk in mental health care settings.

Richard Whittington is Professor of Mental Health in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Liverpool and an Honorary Research Fellow at Mersey Care NHS Trust. He has a PhD from the Institute of Psychiatry in London, and is a researcher and forensic psychologist with a particular research interest in the issues of violence, self-harm and mental health.

Caroline Logan is a Consultant Forensic Clinical Psychologist in Greater Manchester West Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. She has a DPhil from the University of Oxford and is both practitioner and researcher, focusing on violence and self-harm, personality disorder and risk.