Irish Prison Service to spend over €440,000 to research mental health needs of inmates

At the beginning of this year, there were 2,000 Irish prison inmates waiting to be seen by a psychologist.

The Irish Prison Service is set to spend up to €442,000 on a research project to understand the mental health and disability needs of the prison population in this country.

It has said that the current research on the prevalence of mental disorders among the prison population in Ireland is “dated and does not reflect the wide-ranging presentation of mental disorder within this population”.

The research will be used to inform clinical practice in prisons as well as informing pre-release planning and the support of prisoners back into the community.

“The Irish Prison Service, the Health Service Executive (HSE), and the Probation Service are committed to implementing the recommendations of the High Level Task Force established to consider the mental health and addiction challenges of those who come into contact with the Criminal Justice Sector,” it said.

That task force, which published its findings in 2022, put forward 61 recommendations for a multi-agency approach to addressing these issues. This included access to tiered mental health supports that are recovery-oriented for every person with mental health difficulties in the system.

This new research is seeking information on a wide variety of different conditions such as schizophrenia, neurodevelopment disorders such as ADHD, eating disorders, substance use, or addictive behaviours like gambling.

It wants to break this down by age, gender, sentence type and socio-economic indicators amongst a range of other factors.

The Irish Prison Service said it also wants to develop a sustainable model to collect data around this on an ongoing basis.

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As well as that, it requires data on disability such as physical, sensory and neuro-congitive acquired disabilities.

At the beginning of this year, there were 2,000 Irish prison inmates waiting to be seen by a psychologist with a further 524 people on the “psychology service caseload”.

Figures from the Department of Justice suggest 1,400 people are referred to the service annually. By the end of 2024, 546 people had been seen by a psychologist specifically for a mental health referral, 149 people were seen within 12 weeks and 397 people were seen within over 24 weeks, it said.

In last week’s budget, an additional €15.7m was allocated with the aim of recruiting up to 100 additional prison officers in the system along with a 11.2% increase in funding for the Probation Service.