Designing 'Healthy' Prisons for Women: Incorporating Trauma-Informed Care and Practice (TICP) into Prison Planning and Design.

There has been growing acknowledgment among scholars, prison staff and policy-makers that gender-informed thinking should feed into penal policy but must be implemented if gains are to be made in reducing trauma, saving lives, ensuring emotional wellbeing and promoting desistance from crime. This means that not only healthcare services and psychology programmes must be sensitive to individuals' trauma histories but that the architecture and design of prisons should also be sympathetic, facilitating and encouraging trauma-informed and trauma-sensitive practices within. This article problematises the Trauma-Informed Care and Practice (TICP) initiatives recently rolled out across the female prison estate, arguing that attempts to introduce trauma-sensitive services in establishments that are replete with hostile architecture, overt security paraphernalia, and dilapidated fixtures and fittings is futile.

Depression: the ambivalence of diagnosis.

The diagnosis of depression in the clinical context is extremely controversial and is subject to criticism of over-medicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation. Depression can be conceptualised across the entire spectrum of lay and medical belief, from the 'normal' highs and lows of the human condition to its inclusion in the dominant Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classificatory system, as a form of serious mental illness. In this context, a better understanding of how people describe, experience, negotiate and participate in the process of diagnosis is needed.

Screening for breast cancer: medicalization, visualization and the embodied experience.

Women's perspectives on breast screening (mammography and breast awareness) were explored in interviews with midlife women sampled for diversity of background and health experience. Attending mammography screening was considered a social obligation despite women's fears and experiences of discomfort. Women gave considerable legitimacy to mammography visualizations of the breast, and the expert interpretation of these.

Ethical aspects of personality disorders.

Purpose Of Review: To review recent literature around the controversial diagnosis of personality disorder, and to assess the ethical aspects of its status as a medical disorder.

Recent Findings: The diagnostic currency of personality disorder as a psychiatric/medical disorder has a longstanding history of ethical and social challenges through critiques of the medicalization of deviance. More recently controversies by reflexive physicians around the inclusion of the category in the forthcoming revisions of International Classification of Diseases and Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classifications reflect the problems of value-laden criteria, with the diagnostic category being severely challenged from within psychiatry as well as from without.

Health professionals, their medical interventions and uncertainty: a study focusing on women at midlife.

Health professionals face a tension between focusing on the individual and attending to health issues for the population as a whole. This tension is intrinsic to medicine and gives rise to medical uncertainty, which here is explored through accounts of three medical interventions focused on women at midlife: breast screening, hormone replacement therapy and bone densitometry. The accounts come from interviews with UK health professionals using these medical interventions in their daily work.

Evaluating the influence of implicit models of mental disorder on processes of shared decision making within community-based multi-disciplinary teams.

This paper reports findings from a qualitative study concerning the influence of implicit models of mental disorder on shared decision making within community-based mental health teams. One-hundred participants representing five distinct multi-agency groups: psychiatrists, community psychiatric nurses, approved social workers, patients and informal carers operating within Leicestershire, England were interviewed using a standard case vignette describing a person whose behaviour suggests he may have schizophrenia. The results showed that each of the study's multi-agency groups implicitly supports a complex range of model dimensions regarding the nature of schizophrenia, the appropriateness of specific forms of treatment and care, and their respective rights and obligations towards each other.

The end of the road? Lay views on a pain-relief clinic.

Studies of the lay evaluation of pain-relief clinics are rare, particularly in the U.K. Hence, in an attempt to rectify this lacuna, this paper reports the findings of a small-scale qualitative study which charts the vicissitudes of hope and despair of attenders at pain-relief clinics in London.

Health and cancer prevention: knowledge and beliefs of children and young people.

Objective: To collect information from children and young people about their knowledge of and attitudes towards cancer and their understanding of health and health related behaviours to inform future health promotion work.

Design: Questionnaire survey of 15-16 year olds, and interviews with play materials with 9-10 year old children.

Setting: Six inner city, suburban, and rural schools.