Season 3 Episode 2: Perpetrators’ Weaponisation of Mental Health and Addiction Against Survivors
About This Episode
Have you ever seen survivors’ mental health or substance use issues turned against them by a domestic violence perpetrator? Have you been concerned about a domestic violence survivor’s treatment being sabotaged by an abusive partner? In this episode, David and Ruth explore these questions and talk about how a perpetrator pattern–based approach can help protect survivors against these behaviours.
They address three major themes:
What is weaponisation of mental health and addiction?
Why are systems are vulnerable to these manipulations?
How we can fix (or perpetrator-proof) our systems?
Ruth and David explore strategies for improving clinical practice including assessing how current coercive control is impacting access to treatment. They discuss how important it is to recontextualise survivors’ issues back to the perpetrator’s patterns of behaviour as well as examine the implications of documentation and reporting to family court and child protection.
Additional Resources
Online Course: Intersections: When Domestic Violence Perpetration, Substance Abuse & Mental Health Meet
Safe & Together Institute’s Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool
Safe & Together Institute’s domestic abuse–informed trainings
Safe & Together Institute’s upcoming events
David Mandel’s book Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to Transform the Way We Keep Children Safe from Domestic Violence