Mental Health Management Program In New York
A prison may not seem like the most obvious place for self-actualization, with its imposing brick walls and barbed-wire fences. But a program at Fishkill Correctional Facility is trying to help mentally ill inmates learn more about their conditions. Reported in the Auburn Citizen.
The hope is that the program will help inmates cope better in prison and after release, potentially reducing discipline problems and recidivism. It’s the first effort of its kind for general-population inmates in the state, and organizers say the results will fuel a pioneering study …
Mentally ill inmates can have a difficult time in the regimented, controlled atmosphere of a prison, where a disciplinary infraction can be something as simple as not responding quickly enough to a direct order, said Jack Beck, director of the Prison Visiting Project for the Correctional Association of New York, a prisoner advocacy organization. “You have this very intense regulation for people who have a very hard time coping,” he said. “These people find it very hard to survive in that environment.” The program at the Fishkill prison in Beacon, about 70 miles north of New York City, encourages inmates to take active roles in managing their mental health and treatment. They are taught to identify stressors, coping tools and how medication can help. Participants meet in small groups for two hours a week in the 20-week course …
The Center for Urban Community Services, an advocacy group for the homeless and the poor, got a grant from the Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation to run the program for three years. The program, known as “wellness self-management,” soon will include the Sing Sing and Bedford Hill prisons in Westchester County. “What wellness self-management is intended to do is to help people understand and manage their personal problem, their mental health,” said Tony Hannigan, executive director of CUCS. “Most importantly, it gives them hope and the belief that they can recover.” Hannigan said data from 140 program participants will be compared to a control group of other inmates to gauge the program’s effects. It’s the first study of its kind in the United States.
About 15 percent of New York’s prison population — representing about 8,000 inmates — is being treated for some kind of mental illness, state officials said. New York’s prison system has shifted its approach to inmates with mental illness in recent years, following the settlement of a lawsuit, said Howard Holanchock, assistant mental health commissioner for the state Department of Correctional Services. “Before, maybe we were more about care, custody and control,” he said, but now, “it’s understood that we’re trying to have an impact on the population who come into our system.”
The state’s treatment of mentally ill inmates has improved but still needs work, Beck said. He said the Fishkill program had encouraging potential. “This population, more than others, needs that sense of how they can take responsibility for their lives,” he said. But he said the prison system’s culture needs to shift to make sure whatever gains inmates make aren’t negated in day-to-day life. For the program to have real impact, “it has to be supported” in the prison staff’s dealings with mentally ill inmates, Beck said. “You can’t do it in the classroom, then when they get out of the classroom, disempower them every other way,” he said.
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