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A feasibility study of the Reasoning and Rehabilitation Mental Health Programme (R&R2MHP) in male offenders with intellectual disability
Author(s) -
Waugh Alison,
Gudjonsson Gisli H.,
ReesJones Angharad,
Young Susan
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
criminal behaviour and mental health
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.63
H-Index - 54
eISSN - 1471-2857
pISSN - 0957-9664
DOI - 10.1002/cbm.1907
Subject(s) - mental health , citation , psychology , sociology , library science , gerontology , medicine , psychiatry , computer science
A Prison Reform Trust 2007 briefing paper (Loucks, 2007) showed that intellectual disability (ID) offenders are likely to struggle to complete mainstream offending behaviour programmes due to the cognitive or functional deficits associated with their ID. This has been supported in research showing that mainstream offending behaviour programmes are inappropriate and ineffective for use with ID offenders (Jones, 2007). A review of the psychological interventions currently available to violent offenders with ID within secure hospitals and community settings suggests that there has been an improvement in reducing anger problems in offenders with ID (Taylor and Novaco, 2005; Bond, 2012). Furthermore, Lindsay et al. (2011) found evidence that the Social Problem Solving and Offence Related Thinking Programme was effective in improving the social problem solving styles of people with ID. This finding is particularly relevant to our own work with mentally disordered offenders (MDOs) with ID. We conducted a pilot study of the revised Reasoning and Rehabilitation (R&R) Programme developed for delivery to MDOs [R&R Mental Health Programme (R&R2MHP); Young and Ross, 2007a] to ascertain whether it was feasible to deliver the programme to inpatient MDOs with ID by assessing programme completion. We hypothesised that the R&R2MHP would be suitable for ID offenders with completion rates comparable with the 78% obtained when delivered to inpatient MDOs of normal intelligence (Rees-Jones et al., 2012), which was substantially higher than the 50% reported for the original R&R Programme (Cullen et al., 2011) when delivered to a similar population. Hodgins et al. (2011), using the original R&R in community patients, found that none of the 28 men completed the programme, and the authors recommend that patients should be paid for attending the programme in the community. In the present study, 25 inpatients were recruited from two medium secure hospital units for male MDOs with ID and received the group intervention.