Female Prisoners Suffer Disproportionally from Depression, PTSD and Other Mental Illnesses

The Oklahoma Department of Corrections recently released the results of its study revealing major differences in the mental health of male and female inmates. According to the data, nearly 60 percent of female inmates show signs of mental illness, about twice the percentage of male inmates. A total of 3,104 women and 25,620 men were in the corrections system at the time. Women also suffer disproportionately from depression — 64 percent versus 59 percent of men.

But the most striking difference occurs with trauma disorders. PTSD is the second most common mental illness among incarcerated women, with about one in five showing symptoms, or five times the rate for men. Nationally, women are

Photo by Susan Madden Lankford

Photo by Susan Madden Lankford

twice as likely as men to suffer from PTSD because they tend to face more emotional and sexual abuse, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America.

In prison, the effects can be worsened by separation from family or children, the stressful environment and failure to get consistent, quality treatment, other than psychotropic drugs, inmates and mental health experts said.

 

Kimberly Cummings, of Just the Beginning, a Tulsa-based nonprofit that helps women released from prison, says:

No fault in the prison system, that’s just what they’re trained to do: ‘Here, take this pill.’ Because it will numb them. It will numb that pain from trauma.

Women in prison also can easily get illicit drugs, which allow them to avoid confronting trauma issues. They’re good avoiders, and drug use itself is a good way to avoid.

A new challenge for prisoners is the decline in the number of therapy sessions in recent years. From 2012 to 2014, the average number of mental-health group therapy sessions per month in Oklahoma prisons fell by nearly 50 percent, to 176. The average number of offenders in those sessions per month also dropped. Corrections officials attributed the decline to a shortage of psychiatrists, which occurred even as the prison population increased to well above official capacity.

For years, Oklahoma has incarcerated more women per capita than any other state in the nation. Two prisons house female inmates: Dr. Eddie Warrior in Taft, with 965 inmates in late March, and Mabel Bassett Correctional Center in McLoud, with 1,206 inmates.

Eddie Warrior offers a substance-abuse program called Helping Women Recover that includes trauma therapy. Funded by the George Kaiser Family Foundation, the program has curricula called “Beyond Trauma” and “Beyond Violence” that are “trauma informed.”

Trauma disorders afflict women more than men for several reasons. Young girls and boys are equally vulnerable to trauma, but as they enter puberty, boys get bigger and stronger, so their likelihood of experiencing sexual trauma and abuse starts to decline. But the likelihood for women remains the same. Also, when men are victims of violence, it’s often perpetrated by strangers, such as in the military or a bar fight. But women’s trauma often is inflicted by someone close to them who probably expresses affection for them.

More than half of female victims of rape reported that at least one perpetrator was a current or former intimate partner, according to a 2010 national sexual violence survey by the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A lot of Women in Recovery participants have very complex trauma histories. They’re suffering from the effects of not just one traumatic event, but from a series of them, and that can play out over a lifetime. Sending nonviolent offenders to prison while they’re struggling with trauma-related mental illness will only worsen their symptoms. About 62 percent of female inmates showing signs of serious mental illness were nonviolent offenders, according to corrections data.

At Eddie Warrior, one inmate was in an open dorm with about 90 other women. She complained that loud noises and women talking over other women would trigger her severe anxiety. But today, with counseling and more control over her life, she feels a lot more stable and a lot more normal, than she did in prison.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *