Not-criminally responsible stories: Forensic inpatients story their in-hospital experience through essays, poems, lyrics, and song

Abstract

NCR inpatients were invited to submit original works that speak to their in-hospital experience. This editorial begins with me storying my motivations for editing this special issue. The collection that follows is unique, as no other peer-reviewed journal, edited book collection, periodical, or activist publication has dedicated an entire themed issue to NCR inpatients, platforming their stories as sole authors and researchers of themes central to inpatient life. This curated issue is a critical corrective to address the absence of literature on NCR inpatients engaged in research on matters that matter most to them (Askola et al., 2018; Evans et al., 2025) and to center their needs and experiences (Okoroji et al., 2023). They were given wide latitude to discuss whatever aspect of their in-hospital experience they wanted. There were no guiding research questions steering subject content. Storytelling was their research method to explore topics that mattered to them. This marked a rare instance of patient-directed research affirming these ‘othered’ authors as agentic, granting them total control over the research process, how they told their story, and what would be published, while retaining copyright over their contributions. This special issue marks the first known multi-site (multi-institutional) project featuring asylumized authors from more than one ‘general’ psy-facility; the sui generis quality of this issue is made all the starker, because these sites are ‘forensic’ hospitals.