An Exploration of the Capacity to Mentalize Following an Introductory Mentalization Based Treatment Group within an Irish Prison Service

ABSTRACTObjectives This study explored participant experience of mentalization after the completion of an introductory MBT group within an Irish prison.Methods Data were collected from four participants using semi-structured interviews which were analyzed according to IPA methodology.Results Four group experiential themes were identified from the data: making sense of difficulties with emotions in the context of early life experiences, learning to feel and manage emotions, keeping other minds in mind and mentalizing in practice.Conclusions This study adds to the wider qualitative literature on MBT and presents a unique insight into participant experiences of developing their mentalizing capacity within a prison setting.Keywords: mentalizingmentalization-based treatmentMBTanti-social personality disorderprisonviolence AcknowledgmentsThe authors would like to extend thanks to the individuals who gave their time to participate in this study as well as Luke Hickey and Aoife O’Carroll who assisted with participant recruitment and Claire Moloney who assisted with the ethics application.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Data availability statementThe participants of this study did not give written consent for their full datasets to be shared publicly, so due to the sensitive nature of the research supporting data is not available.