Risk factors for self-harm in prison
Written by Rebecca Crook, Research Assistant, PROSPECT project
This month I would like to sign post you to another blog that I recently wrote for the Mental Elf Service. The Mental Elf Service post blogs every weekday with short and snappy summaries that highlight evidence-based publications relevant to mental health practice in the UK and further afield.
A couple of months ago I was asked to write a blog post summarising and offering a critical appraisal of a recent paper in the Lancet Psychiatry, ‘Risk factors for self-harm in prison: a systematic review and meta-analysis‘ (Favril et al., 2020).
My blog post for the Mental Elf begins,
‘People in prison often present with complex needs, including mental health problems, and prisoners are a high risk population for suicide and self-harming behaviours (Fazel et al., 2016). Self-injurious and suicidal behaviour is a large and growing problem in UK prisons. In July 2020 the Ministry of Justice reported a ‘record high’ of self-harm incidents in the twelve months leading to March 2020, showing an increase of 11% from the previous 12 months (Ministry of Justice, 2020).
This is especially pertinent at the time of writing, as we are currently going through an international pandemic, meaning that those who are already incarcerated are likely experiencing increased feelings of loneliness and isolation due to the temporary suspension of prison visits and more time spent in cells. Reports from prison mental health staff suggest these new temporary regulations could lead to an exacerbation of symptoms among those with prior mental health difficulties, and deterioration in those without pre-existing conditions (Kothari et al., 2020).
Relatively little is known about the underlying mechanisms for self-injurious behaviours amongst prisoners, and whilst previous research has examined a range of individual and environmental correlates of self-harm in prisoners, findings are inconsistent. Hence Favril and colleagues’ timely report that aimed to “synthesise the evidence and assess the risk factors associated with self-harm in prison” (Favril et al., 2020)’
Read the full blog post on the Mental Elf here.
About Rebecca Crook:
Rebecca is a Research Assistant at the University of Manchester, currently working full-time on the PROSPECT project. She has worked at the university in the Division of Psychology and Mental Health for the last three years on projects around offender health, and postgraduate researcher mental health and wellbeing. Rebecca’s higher education background is multi-disciplinary; her undergraduate and taught postgraduate degrees are both in Criminal Justice, and she is in the final stages of writing up her PhD in Public Health. At the moment, Rebecca’s work on PROSPECT is focussed on developing a model of how the PROSPECT intervention will work in the prison environment.
Outside of work (and finishing her thesis), Rebecca usually enjoys socialising with friends and family, playing netball, and going to gigs. For the last six months she has found light relief in gardening in the sunshine, reading more, socialising (mostly through a computer screen), and lots of episodes of Ru Paul’s Drag Race. I mean… a lot.