Tom Palmstierna

I have been a senior psychiatrist since 1989 and as such have held clinical and leadership positions mainly in the field of substance use disorders at Stockholm Addiction Centre. Until 2023 I worked clinically as senior psychiatrist at the forensic psychiatric outpatient service i Stockholm, a collaboration between Stockholm Addiction Centre, the Forensic Psychiatric Clinic of Stockholm County and the Prison and probation services i the Stockholm county region My research activities are mostly joint ventures between our research group at the Karolinska Institutet and since 2006 the forensic research unit at Haukeland hospital in Bergen and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim where I hold a position as professor at the faculty of medicine.

My current research activities are, since 1984, detection, prevention, treatment and management of violence in psychiatric populations, including dual diagnosis patients. Initially this included the construction of the Staff Observation Aggression Scale (SOAS) in 1984 and its evaluation in my PhD thesis 1992. This report scale was revised and validated in collaboration with Professor Henk Nijman in 1999 into the current version SOAS-R. Currently I am partner and supervisor in projects on intimate partner violence at Broset/NTNU. In the other end of the spectrum, I am engaged in projects regarding how to facilitate rehabilitation of forensic psychiatric patients with violence problems. We use different research approaches. Some studies are purely qualitative, others are randomized controlled studies and yet others are pure register studies.