Question: What was the most interesting case you worked whilst at the prison ?

John Atkinson answered on 18 Jun 2018:

When I was in prison, the most interesting case was in my last few days there, when at the very end of an interview, I was able to identify that the prisoner was actually really delusional and mentally ill and really should not have been in hospital. She had been talking coherently and then all of a sudden started speaking about very strange things that were not real. I managed to put her in touch with the mental health team to get her some help.
ONe of the most interesting cases I have worked on in hospital was a man who had committed a serious but ‘one off’ sexual offence. He had been in prison and hospital for years and was losing hope of ever getting out. He had a really bad self esteem and found it difficult to work on his offending due to the shame and his own personal problems within the family. With the help of a psychotherapist we were eventually able to work on his personal problems and get him to a point where he engaged in offending work which meant that he eventually got discharged because he was able to reduce his risk so much. This was very satisfying because a lot of people (including me at one point) thought he would never get out of hospital.