Brief mental health screening of prison entrants: psychiatric history versus symptom screening for the prediction of in-prison outcomes

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While prisoners are known to suffer very high rates of mental illness, evidence is often lacking to inform the development of effective approaches to prison mental health service provision, including the approach to mental health screening. In addition, research to date has been dominated by prevalence studies and little is known about the mental health needs of prisoners over time. A random sample of prison entrants was recruited from a large remand and reception prison in New South Wales, Australia (n = 707) for the completion of a brief health survey. A second survey was completed during the subsequent six months (n = 317) in order to examine the effect of timing of assessment on mental health status. Those followed up within three months (n = 182) were further included in an analysis of predictive validity comparing the performance at baseline of self-reported history of previous diagnosis versus current symptom screening for psychological distress, in predicting subsequent mental illness. When assessed over six months from prison entry, mental health status was found to vary by timing of assessment. At prison entry, self-reported history of previous diagnosis of a mental health disorder was found to be a better predictor of mental illness over three months than screening for psychological distress.