When University of Pennsylvania doctoral student Helena Addison worked as a nurse at an inpatient psychiatric hospital, she encountered many people who had previously been incarcerated. The interactions made her want to better understand the mental health fallout from such an experience.
“Initially, I was looking at incarceration as a source of trauma for Black men,” says Addison, a fourth-year Presidential Ph.D. Fellow in Penn’s School of Nursing. “As I learned more, it broadened to the idea of incarceration as a social determinant of health, still specifically looking at mental health.”
In collaboration with Sara Jacoby, an assistant professor in the School of Nursing, Addison evaluated what science currently knows about the psychological ramifications for Black men of going through such a detention. Reviewing nearly two dozen articles from the past decade, she discovered that for this group in the United States there exists a link between incarceration and higher levels of psychological distress, more severe symptoms of PTSD and depression, and many other facets of poor mental health.
“Incarceration is underappreciated as a social determinant of health,” says Jacoby, whose research focuses on trauma and violence. “It’s something that we talk about, but it’s not something that’s always articulated so specifically. This work does so in a way that has been lacking for nursing and a broader health care audience.”
Her main objective had been to identify differences in mental health outcomes between formerly incarcerated and never incarcerated Black men. “In that context,” she says, “both had poor mental health outcomes associated with things like unemployment and family conflict. But Black men who had been incarcerated had more PTSD symptoms. That’s one instance where you can see, despite these groups experiencing some of the same trauma, incarceration specifically had an impact.”
Longer imprisonment and time spent in solitary confinement mattered, too, increasing the negative mental health symptoms formerly incarcerated Black men suffered later. Despite that, Addison and Jacoby found that few of these men discussed seeking help, reporting barriers such as long waits and a need to prioritize different aspects of their reentry like housing or employment.
Read more at PennToday.UPenn.edu.
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