Prison officers can recognise hidden psychiatric morbidity in prisoners

BMJ 1999;319:853 ( 25 September )

Letters

Prison officers can recognise hidden psychiatric morbidity in prisoners

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR $---$ Prisons in England and Wales are known to house a considerable number of mentally ill people.^1-3 Many of these peopleprobably pass through health screening undetected when they arereceived into prison and remain on ordinary location (on prisonwings) without ever coming to the attention of a doctor. ⁴ ⁵

During two visits to large local male remand prisons as a guest medical inspector with the Inspectorate of Prisons I decidedto see how difficult it was to identify hitherto undetected mentalillness in prisoners on ordinary prison location. I asked prisonofficers to identify inmates on their landing whom they consideredto be odd, strange, or behaviourally disturbed. The officers hadno difficulty identifying between two and five (out of 35-40)inmates per landing on each of the six landings I surveyed. Thedescription of the behaviour of some of these prisoners stronglysuggested that they werepsychotic.

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