Reporting on vulnerable clients including those with cognitive impairments

This chapter defines vulnerable/special needs clients as those who are intellectually disabled, severely mentally ill, cognitively limited, elderly, and other less common presentations that would render clients both vulnerable and hard to serve. It provides information regarding the assessment of clients with intellectual disabilities and other cognitive limitations, mental health issues and other presentations leading to vulnerability – collectively described as special needs offenders. Psychological assessments, by definition, are likely to be highly specialised documents, replete with lots of jargon and technical language. Psychological reports are used variously for sentencing, consideration of alternatives to incarceration, community placement decisions, suggestions regarding support requirements and information for supervision/risk management frameworks. A range of standardised and clinical tools are used to examine special needs clients in a variety of domains, both in regard to general personal and interpersonal functioning, as well as specialised assessment of issues and problems related to inappropriate behaviour.