Which psychological interventions show efficiency to prevent suicide related behavior and self-harm in jail?

By Anna Pedrola Pons

Suicidal and self-injurious behavior in prison shows lower levels of incidence when specific treatment programs are delivered, such as those based in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Dialectical Behavior Therapy.

In prison context, the prevalence of deaths by suicide is higher than that among the general population, being one of the most common causes of death between incarcerated people. Self-injury is also a substantial cause of morbidity in penitentiaries, although it is less studied than suicide.

To manage these high rates of prison suicidal and self-injury behaviours, literature suggests that prevention programs and psychological interventions such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy , Dialectical Behavior Therapy and Brief Strategic Therapy may be effective in preventing suicidal and self-injurious behavior.

The study conducted by Pedrola-Pons and others, intended to provide evidence of the efficacy of prison prevention suicidal and self-injury psychological interventions, and presented quantitative results of 18 programs making it possible to compare, the efficiency of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy programs with the efficiency of therapies focused on third generation models.

Regarding this research, the use of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy reduces suicidal ideation in all studies reviewed; third-generation therapy techniques reported efficacy for decreasing suicidal and self-injurious behaviours in 75% of the interventions, among which an intervention based on Dialectical Behavior Therapy was found to obtain positive results amongst incarcerated women. Other preventive programs, such as those that applied brief strategic therapy, showed moderate evidence of reduced self-injurious behavior.

The scarcity of existing studies that show quantitative evaluations for the prevention of suicidal and self-injurious behavior in incarcerated people, reduces the ability to infer the effectiveness of some prevention programs over others.

The prevalence of suicidal and self-injurious behavior in prisons is high, and its prevention is a challenge for such institutions and for society. For the prison context to adopt effective strategies, further research is needed in gender sensitive interventions and multimodal approaches, that focus on the incarceration process at different levels.

Original paper: Pedrola-Pons, A., Sanchez-Carro, Y., Pemau, A., Garcia-Ramos, A., & De la Torre-Luque, A. (2024). Efficiency of psychological interventions in the prevention of suicidal behavior and self-injury in penitentiary population: A systematic review. International journal of law and psychiatry, 92, 101948. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijlp.2023.101948