The culture of fear: expanding the concept of risk in forensic psychiatric nursing

The purpose of this article is to present, in part, the results of a nursing research that aimed at describing how fear influences nurse-patient interactions in a forensic psychiatric setting. Guided by an inductive research design (grounded theory), the analysis of data revealed that nurses incorporate a risk discourse into their practice. As a result, our data show that cultural narratives of risk affect the experience of nursing care and nurses’ day-to-day management of potential threats embodied by the patients. Furthermore, we assert that risk management is enmeshed in a cultural script that justifies the deployment of precautionary actions.