16 December 2020

Offender Care staff were recently asked to contribute a professional voice to a Prison radio series called “free your mind” focused around mental health and coping in custody.

Dr Sarah Allen, Joint Lead Psychologist for Offender Care recorded contributions for twelve programmes on topics as diverse as loss, low mood, disconnection and paranoid thinking.

The programmes, commissioned by Health and Justice at NHS England, are being coproduced with service users through the service user organisation Empowering People: Inspiring Change (EPIC) and will be aired three times a week in the new year on prison radio.

Details about prison radio are here: https://prison.radio/about/ 

Dr Allen spoke about normalising difficult experiences, self-help strategies, and ways to cope in various difficult and challenging circumstances.

She said of the programmes: “This felt like a great example of innovative actions, which will provide a valuable alternative medium for people to hear important messages about how they might cope and access support whilst in custody, especially in the current situation where our usual ways of communicating with residents and providing education and support are curtailed.”