arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

"In terms of the burden of psychiatric illness it is huge because the number of prisoners in the world is over nine million," said Dr. Seena Fazel, a psychiatrist at the University of Oxford in England. He estimated there were more psychiatric patients in prisons than in hospitals in western countries, which posed a huge risk to prisoners and society. "A lot of them have mental illness and that constitutes a risk, not only for suicide for these prisoners, but also for public health because if they are not being treated properly and they go back into the community they are going to remain ill," he explained. Fazel and John Danesh, of the Institute of Public Health at the University of Cambridge, reviewed and pooled together data from 62 surveys of nearly 23,000 prisoners in European nations, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In a report in The Lancet medical journal they said prisoners were two to four times more likely to have an antisocial disorder than the general population. Four percent of men and women in western prisons had a psychotic illness, about 10-12 percent suffered from major depression and 65 percent of men and 42 percent of women had a personality disorder. "Psychiatric illness in prisoners is a serious problem and in many countries around the world mental health services for prisons need to be reviewed," Fazel said in an interview.