Main questions in the relation between mental health department and prison: complexity of the problems and hypothesis of intervention

Abstract

The authors propose a reflection on some problems of the psychiatric assistance in jail by the Mental Health Department. First, the necessity to build specific technical tools for the psychiatric intervention in the jail, built on the model of the community and consultation psychiatry, with more attention to the precarised populations, the impact with the migratory phenomenon and the dual diagnosis, the specific places of that institution and the institutional actors. Second, the necessity to have specific spaces for work in jails and - contextually - to consider the relationship with the Forensic Psychiatric Hospitals, in order to built more coherent and effective therapeutic projects for infirmity, to reject to answer to inappropriate questions for a disciplinar role by the penitentiary world in situations of difficulty. Third, the necessity to equip with specific additional tools to front some conditions of suffering placed to the limits of pathology, such as some serious crimes, some personality disorders and the sexual crimes, for whose treatment the tools and the experience available in the DSMs often seem insufficient.