Sociocultural identification of migrant forensic psychiatric inpatients facing mandatory repatriation – a hospital ethnography

In the Netherlands, terbeschikkingstelling (TBS) is a forensic psychiatric measure imposed on individuals who commit a criminal offence under diminished responsibility due to severe mental illness. For TBS patients without Dutch nationality, mandatory repatriation replaces resocialization as the final goal of TBS treatment, as they lose Dutch residency rights due to their offence. This article examines how this subgroup of TBS patients at a Dutch Centre for Transcultural Forensic Psychiatry reflect on and negotiate cultural identity at the intersection of criminal and migration law. Focusing on sociocultural identification, we adopt a dynamic and relational approach to cultural identity that attends to life histories, transnational social ties, institutional positioning and imposed categories of otherness reinforced by involuntary return policies. Data were gathered through in-depth life-course interviews, focus groups, and participant observation on four high-security wards between 2022 and 2024. Participants' narratives reflect chronic uprootedness and cultural fragmentation, but also highlight forms of resilience, as identities are redefined through lived experiences of 'having been places' and situational forms of belonging within transnational social contexts. Cultural identity emerges as layered and fluid, dynamically shaped across multiple social fields, rather than anchored in fixed national or ethnic categories. By centring lived experiences from within a highly regulated institutional setting, this study offers qualitative insight into how cultural identity takes shape under conditions of constrained agency and prolonged uncertainty, and highlights the implications of these processes for forensic psychiatric care. Substantiated with the experiences of individuals whose voices are rarely heard, this article delivers a critical analysis of a system in which people risk being lost or caught between equally impossible future perspectives.