MEN: "Mental health issues hit 4 out of 5 inmates at Styal women’s prison"

And another article on mental health from local media. This time much less positive (though thankfully balanced) but highlighting a really important issue, that many people in our prison system experience mental health issues.

The MEN reports: "Some 80 per cent of inmates had at least one diagnosed mental health issue, while 70 per cent had two or more. Despite that, the mental health unit at the over-stretched Cheshire prison had space for just ten women, the report found."

Full article here.

What I found more disturbing than the article were the comments - why is it that people spend their time posting such negative things? Here's a selection of the worst...

"is this 80.000 hyperciondriacs or just a lot of excuses for being locked up?????"

"They must have been mental to have been put in there in the first place."

I'll be optimistic and say that the kind of people who post comments such as this probably aren't very pleasant and aren't representative of the population as a whole. I've responded to some of the most unpleasant ones, though I'm not sure it's really worth engaging with people like that!

Rethink Mental Illness, the national charity that we're a part of, have a whole section of their website dedicated to criminal justice and mental health. If you're affected you can access plenty of information from this page.

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Update on closure of MRI inpatient services

The NHS North West Board has approved the capital funding for Manchester Mental Health and Social Care Trust's Inpatient Pathway Redesign (IPR) Project. See the Trust's website for more information about this . This means that the Trust will now proceed with plans to relocate its inpatient services to two sites from the current three. The change will result in the inpatient beds that are currently at Edale House at Manchester Royal Infirmary being relocated to Park House on the North Manchester General Hospital site. The Trust says: "This will give us unprecedented opportunities to improve care to our service users and their carers." When the Trust announced its intention to close the inpatient unit at MRI we wrote to the Manchester Evening News to express our concerns about the extra burden this would place on some carers in terms of extra travelling time. The Trust's latest communication about the IPR states that: "The work in addressing concerns about ...

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Rethink Mental Illness Manchester Group

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