Back in June, Dr. Nicholls and two of our trainees, Dr. Austin Lam and Liam Gorsuch, presented a symposium at the International Association of Forensic Mental Health Services 2024 Conference, entitled “Examining the needs and trajectories of subgroups of people admitted to custody in provincial correctional centres: Substance use, Suicide, Sexually motivated offending and Women”. Our team shared findings from an in-depth examination of three subgroups (women; people with a history of sexual offences; people with a lifetime history of suicide attempts) of all people (N > 166,000) admitted to provincial correctional centres in British Columbia, Canada over nearly a decade.
Read the abstracts below for an overview of our symposium.
Dr. Nicholls spoke on the “Time Trends and Gender Distinctions among People Admitted to Provincial Custody: Implications for Systems-Level Planning”.
Experts have long advocated for gender-informed mental health (APA,2018), substance use (SAMHSA,TIP51), and correctional interventions (Bangkok Rules,2011) to address the specific needs of women. We contrast needs and trajectories of 5,229 women and 38,191 men admitted to BC provincial correctional centres 2009-2017. Data sources included the Jail Screening Assessment Tool and the BC Corrections records. Consistent with calls for gender-informed services, women had distinct profiles from men, reflecting more prevalent and more severe mental health and psychosocial needs (e.g., any MHSU need: women = 87%; men = 76%). Implications for practice and systems-level planning will be discussed.
Dr. Lam discussed findings related to people with sexual offences, “A Comparison of People with a Sexual Offence History and People with a Non-Sexual Offence History: Substance Use Patterns, Mental Health Needs, and Concurrent Disorders”.
We compared 2,576 men with sexual offences (SO) to 31,127 men with strictly non-sexual offences (NSO) across several domains, including substance use, mental health needs, as well as sociodemographic and risk-related variables. Our sample consists of new admissions to all relevant BC provincial correctional centres from January 2009 to September 2017. Data sources included the Jail Screening Assessment Tool (JSAT; Nicholls et al., 2005) and the BC Corrections Operations Network (CORNET). The SO and NSO groups had distinct clinical profiles, with the SO group having greater mental health needs. In our subgroup analyses, men with both sexual and violent offences showed greater substance misuse specific to alcohol and marijuana. Offence history may help inform targeted interventions for people in provincial custody.
Liam presented on “Substance Use & Attempted Suicide Among People Admitted to British Columbia Jails”.
To elucidate the relationship between substance misuse and suicide attempts among people entering custody, we performed a secondary analysis of N = 87,789 screening interviews from 8 correctional facilities in British Columbia, Canada. Ever attempting suicide was significantly more likely among those reporting any substance use. Methamphetamine, alcohol, and polysubstance misuse displayed weak but substantive relationships with suicide. Finally, between the first and last year of study, the prevalence of self- reported community-based suicide attempts increased substantially, from 12.10% to 23.58% of respondents, while custodial attempts remained virtually unchanged. These findings not only shed light on this comorbidity in the BC Corrections population, but also reinforce the need for relevant suicide and substance misuse-specific transitional supports.
Overall, our JSAT Symposium shared important findings about people admitted to custody in BC correctional centres that shed light on policy and practice priorities.