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Women with intellectual disability in secure settings and their mental health needs
- Author:
- BEBER Elizabeth
- Journal article citation:
- Advances in Mental Health and Intellectual Disabilities, 6(3), 2012, pp.151-158.
- Publisher:
- Emerald
Despite the lack of empirical evidence to support their development, services for intellectually disabled women offenders have grown up in the UK within both the NHS and the independent sector. This article describes this development and outlines what is known about their mental health needs. It draws on what is known historically about the subject, findings from the current literature and the author's own personal knowledge of these specialist services. It appears that services for women with intellectual disability have largely developed out of mainstream forensic and learning disability services, either male or mixed gender services. Although there is some literature on offending in the intellectually disabled population as a whole, little of this is specific to women. Despite this, the evidence there is suggests that women continue to require secure services and that they have significant mental health needs. The clinical characteristics of women who populate these services include having a milder degree of intellectual disability, high levels of violent offending, high rates of deliberate self harm and a high likelihood of a diagnosis of emotionally unstable personality disorder. The author suggests that there is a need to improve secure services for women in mainstream psychiatry, although further work is required around outcome measures for this group.