Report: Impacts of Institutionalisation (2024)

Introduction

This report has been commissioned by the Bugmy Bar Book Project Committee. It is a psychiatric report about institutionalisation and its impacts, which includes detention and custodial as well as out-of-home care settings. The report includes reference to research and opinion about particular impacts for First Nations peoples.

To prepare this report, the authors conducted a thorough review of the institutionalisation literature as it applies in the context of detention, custodial and out-of-home care settings. They used this in conjunction with their combined training, study and experiences of working in institutions, including psychiatric hospitals for adults and children, adult prisons, youth detention facilities and working with persons subject to community restrictions.

In the Appendix, the authors provided de-identified amalgam case examples to illustrate the points made in the report. These are cases from their practice. The authors state that while they have been altered to protect identities, they retain the key clinical elements of the presentation.

The authors also reviewed the Bugmy Bar Book chapters titled ‘Impacts of Imprisonment and Remand in Custody’ and ‘Out-of-Home Care’, and accept the findings of the research set out in those chapters and recommend that this report be read in conjunction with those chapters.

This report may be used in legal proceedings to assist the courts, tribunals, inquiries, inquests, as well as lawyers, advocates, practitioners, health and allied health professionals, and others to understand the impacts of institutionalisation in youth detention, prison and out-of-home care.