Angela Kirwin, renowned writer-activist and author of the riveting book, How Prisons Are Failing Us All, takes center stage in this episode, providing some harrowing insights into the world of neurodiversity, mental health, and the criminal justice system.
Join us as we peel back the layers of societal expectations and the challenges they pose in diagnosing ADHD, especially in women and girls.
This episode mines the groundbreaking work of the ADHD Alliance, shedding light on the invaluable support they provide to neurodiverse individuals within the police force.
Hear first-hand about their collaboration on a pioneering study with the City of London Police, where every arrested individual is screened for ADHD, a potentially game-changing approach in the justice system.
Angela emphasizes the urgency of facing the underlying issues faced by women in prisons, especially mental health concerns and the stark absence of safe housing.
Navigating ADHD can be a profound struggle. Angela draws from her personal journey with ADHD, sharing her frustrations with self-diagnosis, the exorbitant costs linked to a formal diagnosis, and the power of therapy in fostering self-understanding and growth.
The episode underscores the importance of acknowledging mental health conditions in prisons, and highlights the potential of creative outlets for neurodiverse individuals while cautioning against self-diagnosis. This is a must-listen episode for those intrigued by ADHD, mental health, and the criminal justice system.
For more unmissable content from The View sign up here
Angela Kirwin, renowned writer-activist and author of the riveting book, How Prisons Are Failing Us All, takes center stage in this episode, providing some harrowing insights into the world of neurodiversity, mental health, and the criminal justice system.
Join us as we peel back the layers of societal expectations and the challenges they pose in diagnosing ADHD, especially in women and girls.
This episode mines the groundbreaking work of the ADHD Alliance, shedding light on the invaluable support they provide to neurodiverse individuals within the police force.
Hear first-hand about their collaboration on a pioneering study with the City of London Police, where every arrested individual is screened for ADHD, a potentially game-changing approach in the justice system.
Angela emphasizes the urgency of facing the underlying issues faced by women in prisons, especially mental health concerns and the stark absence of safe housing.
Navigating ADHD can be a profound struggle. Angela draws from her personal journey with ADHD, sharing her frustrations with self-diagnosis, the exorbitant costs linked to a formal diagnosis, and the power of therapy in fostering self-understanding and growth.
The episode underscores the importance of acknowledging mental health conditions in prisons, and highlights the potential of creative outlets for neurodiverse individuals while cautioning against self-diagnosis. This is a must-listen episode for those intrigued by ADHD, mental health, and the criminal justice system.
For more unmissable content from The View sign up here
Welcome to the View Magazine's Rebel Justice podcast Disclosure. This podcast contains content about violence against women which some users may find traumatizing. Please listen with care and look after yourself if it feels overwhelming or triggering. In this week's podcast, we bring you writer-activist Angela Kerwin. For over 10 years in the social care sector, she worked with hundreds of people with criminal convictions, both inside prison and out in the community. Today she advocates for the rights of prisoners who were diagnosed with ADHD ADD. Angela spoke about her book how Are Prisons Are Failing Us All, and of her experience of being diagnosed with ADHD and her life after it. Angela, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and speaking to us today.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me. I am really, really excited about speaking about all these things with you.
Speaker 1:Just to start with, to give a little introduction to our listeners what led you to be interested in the social care sector?
Speaker 2:So I think I never chose social care as a career. I think it's one of these things that just happened to me. So I was a young carer for my grandma who had dementia, and I was a carer for her from kind of the age of 12 until she passed away when I was 21. And through caring for her I learned about the social care system a lot, because you need to develop a really good understanding of how to access support and what support is available, and I realized that had my grandma not had me to help her, she wouldn't have been able to advocate for herself. The system is so complicated and so complex that I don't understand really how people who are service users, people who need the services, can access them without support.
Speaker 2:But from this experience being a carer for my grandma, all my jobs ended up being working with young people at risk of exclusion from school or working with teenagers who were kind of the naughty teenagers on the estate and everyone was worried about their gang affiliations. So I just rolled into these jobs of working with people that I love and when my grandma did pass away, when I was 21, I went and did my matters in social work, which I always thought I would work with old people as a social worker. I always just assumed this is what would happen, and it's not what happened at all. Really, all the experience of working with young people in the community put me on a path towards working in prison, and that's what I ended up specializing in in working in substance, misuse, mental health and working with people who either had experience of the system of incarceration or were at risk of becoming involved in the criminal justice system.
Speaker 1:Wow, one of the things you do is you focus a lot on your diversity, and I was just curious to know if you found that there is a difference in the way that symptoms manifest between young women or boys.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love this question and I'll start at the outset saying I don't think I have a very good answer because I don't think that is a really clear answer yet about what is biology, what is physiology and what is the impact of society and context on how we raise boys and girls and how their different symptoms display. I know there's loads of research at the moment around the impact of female biology or particularly around people who menstruate and ADHD. But I think with all things medical there's never enough funding for the women and girls. So I think our understanding of ADHD at the moment is probably from quite a male brain, male body point of view. But there is research that shows, especially at different phases of a menstrual cycle, the hormones interact with each other in very weird different ways that can really impact a neurodiverse brain differently. On the whole, I don't really like saying that girls and boys innately have different ADHD symptoms.
Speaker 2:I think I was like a really hyperactive, impulsive kid. I think I probably looked like you expect those little boys to look and I was lucky that my mum kind of channeled me into doing lots of outdoor activities and lots of sports and burning off that energy. But I don't necessarily think that girls and boys are different when they're very young. I think we see a really big difference when societal expectations start to have their impact on girls, and I think that happens so young, right. That's not just something in teenage girls.
Speaker 2:I think we start to take on this understanding of the expectations of who we're meant to be.
Speaker 2:We're meant to be quiet, we're not meant to take up too much space, and what I see then is that all that hyperactivity, instead of being externalised, it starts going on just in the brain, and then all that noise gets so busy in your brain.
Speaker 2:All that internal monologue, all that chaos that you could get rid of externally if you could burn off all your energy, now becomes internal, and I think I see with girls and women that that can quickly become quite self-destructive. It can become a real narrative in your mind that you're the problem, that you're not normal, that you need to try and fit in, and it then develops just into this real loss of identity, this loss of self-esteem, this loss of belief in yourself, and then presents itself as all sorts of other different mental health issues, like depression and anxiety. And the problem with that is then doctors will recognize depression and anxiety in women. They like to treat us for that, but they then still miss the underlying issue, which is the neurodiversity. So, as I said, I don't think that's a very concise answer. But, as with everything, when we ask, is it nature or nurture, I kind of think it's a bit of both.
Speaker 1:Yes, it sounds about right, especially when you talk about how society perceives how women should be. So do you think there is less tolerance and even pathways for women and girls diagnosed with ADHD?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I think there is a whole generation of women who were missed for diagnosis in their childhood. I think now we see ADHD becoming I suppose in inverted commas, like more popular, and we see lots of critique of this TikTok diagnosis and this kind of thing, and I absolutely hate this. I think so. Harry Styles said that when girls become fans of a band, they suddenly become like uncle and music journalists try to discredit the band, and I think we kind of see the same thing with ADHD is that now the girls are saying like I want a diagnosis. Suddenly it's not acceptable anymore. We're kind of closing the shutters, we're closing the gates and girls can't access this anymore.
Speaker 2:So whilst I do think we are talking about it more and that's amazing and people are talking about their own diagnoses in public like this is what I'm trying to do so people can see what it looks like in women and girls I think there's a real worry that there's gonna be a backlash against diagnosis, and I think people are seeing this already with a backlash. When they try and speak to their GP, they're you know, the eye rolls are coming in and it's oh, you just saw this on TikTok. So like shut up and go home. I think it's this ingrained view that women are not serious or not intelligent enough to understand what's going on in their own brains, and there's medical model that is focused from a male perspective. So, yeah, I think we've still got a big fight ahead of us for all the women and girls, but hopefully there are enough voices now making a noise about this that things will start to change, I hope.
Speaker 1:Yes, In terms of the criminal justice system. What do you think could be done to better educate the barristers and solicitors on this high prevalence of undiagnosed ADHD, ADD in people in the criminal justice system? Then maybe this could make a system more fair, more balanced. What do you think that could be done?
Speaker 2:I think when I worked in prison so I worked in prison for years and I worked with mainly men, and it was mainly men who presented with these exact ADHD symptoms that we would all recognize this hyperactivity, this impulsivity, risk taking. And even me, as a social care member of staff who has ADHD myself, I rarely made any sort of neurodiverse referral because we just didn't talk about it, we didn't think about it, it wasn't on our radar, and that's insane, that's crazy. There are government estimates that 25% of people who are incarcerated have ADHD. Lots of professionals who work inside prisons think it's way, way higher than that, but it's insane that we didn't consider it as a pathway of support, a pathway to stop people in their lives doing things like using drugs or doing risky things involving crime. So even just getting it on the radar of prisons, of barrister solicitors, is the first hurdle. Now I think we're doing that.
Speaker 2:I think there are people doing really good work around that. So there is the ADHD Alliance has been set up by a couple of neurodiverse police officers and they now offer support to neurodiverse colleagues in the police. This is awesome because people who don't go and work office jobs, people who go and work high adrenaline jobs like the police very often. There's probably a higher prevalence of police officers with ADHD. But they're not just supporting the staff, they're actually delivering lots and lots of training for when people come into contact with the police, so when people are arrested. So they're training their staff on how to conduct interviews, how to change the lighting in police stations, what the symptoms of different types of neurodiversity are, so the police can engage better with people with these sorts of disorders. And a really big thing they've been doing they're doing a pilot study with the City of London Police where everyone who is arrested is screened for ADHD. There's just a really quick screening tool because we ask questions about your physical health and about your mental health upon arrest and we never ask about neurodiversity. So these people who are being screened will be fast-tracked into assessment and diagnosis and I think that's an awesome, awesome first step. I think there are a couple of prisons in the country now that have specialist neurodiversity wings, which is a wonderful first step. Again, I mean, I am sceptical about how, in a big old Victorian prison, can deal with the sensory overload of the noise, the smells, the lights. I mean they're doing their best in a building that's not fit for purpose or a system that's not fit for purpose, but those are good starts and those things didn't exist when I finished working full time in prison five years ago.
Speaker 2:None of this was talked about. So we have made improvements, but I think that if we're looking at magistrates, courts, if we're looking at barristers, solicitors, judges, there needs to be the question asked of everyone who comes in front of a magistrate, usually for quite a petty offence has an ADHD screening been done? And if not, why not? And if it has, do we think this has an impact on their offending behaviour? And I think, the sooner that becomes normalised, that we should just be asking has this person been screened? If not, let's do it and does that have an impact on their offending? So that's what I think we should be doing.
Speaker 1:It actually doesn't sound that complicated to implement, does it?
Speaker 2:A screening tool takes five minutes and I know, like I've been a social worker, I've had people like me come and be like, oh, this extra piece of work only takes five minutes. Just do it, because I've rolled my eyes and said do you know how many clients I have or how many five minute pieces of work I have to do? I understand it is extra work, but it is a five minute screening tool and that's all. And if it stops people constantly, constantly reoffending related to their substance misuse, that's related to their ADHD, or offending that's related to being unmedicated for ADHD, then we're reducing reoffending. It's a very easy win in my eyes.
Speaker 1:Completely. You wrote a book. How Are Prisons Are Failing as All? How did it come about and why did you feel the impulse to write it?
Speaker 2:I suppose this is a very ADHD answer on my part, but I never intended to write a book. I never intended to publish it once I'd written it. I have always written. I write it's my way of kind of trying to figure out what's going on in my brain. Even when I'm a little kid I'm journaling away.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, so working in prison, it prison's horrible, prison's awful. I think prison destroys the mental health of anyone who is unfortunate to step foot inside it, whether that's staff or inmates in inverted commas people who are incarcerated. So I journaled and I was journaling about what I was seeing and I was angry at the system, and I was angry at a system that I saw debilitated people rather than rehabilitated and I wrote about it. And suddenly I realized after a few months that there could be a book in there. And that's kind of how it came about.
Speaker 2:And originally I only wrote the stories of the people I worked with. So a chapter about Tom, who is in prison for substance misuse issues, or a chapter about Dean, who is in prison because he's on remand. And once it got to the publishers, we then pulled those chapters out to actually add in a lot more of the stats and facts. So, yes, this person is on remand. I'm telling you his story, but actually there's 15,000 people on remand in prison at the moment and the publisher helped me really build quite a compelling argument for why prisons are terrible from these individual stories that I had.
Speaker 1:And it's an important book. Do you have any thoughts on sending women with mental health conditions to prison and on the welfare care provided or not for them in prison?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that 99% of women who are in prison just shouldn't be there. I think, particularly for women in custody, offending is often a symptom of other things going on in their lives and if we address those underlying issues, the offending would stop. I'm working on a few reports at the moment specifically focused on women's prisons, and the women's prison estate is awful. We are getting reports you know the inspection reports saying these are the worst conditions I've ever seen in a prison in my whole time at the inspectorate. This is not to say that I don't think there are. There are amazing hardworking staff who are trying their best in these establishments and I would never want to do a disservice to those people.
Speaker 2:But the system has failed and, as I mentioned, I feel like my mental health was on the floor when I finished working in prisons.
Speaker 2:I cannot imagine what it's like to have to live in a prison, to be incarcerated.
Speaker 2:There is no way I think a prison can ever improve someone's mental health, and it's really silly kind of metaphor to say we had the experience of lockdown, but I think it's the only thing I can say that maybe people can relate to you that when you couldn't see your friends and family.
Speaker 2:When you lost your identity of your job all of a sudden, when you couldn't leave your home, I don't think very many of us felt good. And then imagine doing that, but just sat in your bathroom, so a room the size of your bathroom with one other person who's a stranger and no access to the outside world. That's prison right. So I think I'm just pretty scathing about the mental health support inside women's prisons particularly. I think there are wonderful, wonderful organisations doing really good work, creatively, doing really good courses, doing what they can, but ultimately, if those courses are happening within a custodial setting, within a prison setting, I think that not we're fighting a losing battle, but that we're never getting to the root of the problem, which is that women 99% of them should not be in prison at all and their mental health would be better served in any other environment than prison.
Speaker 1:I think so do you think there should be more access to help outside of prison to prevent this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and I think that's the difficult thing. I think we've seen community services really cut to the bone over recent years. But even schemes like SureStart that I think were incredible for women, incredible for mothers to access support in the community we've seen those kind of slashed and burned but I think they were really great services. But ultimately, if someone has substance misuse issues, if we treated that as a health issue rather than a criminal issue or the associated petty offending or low level offending around substance misuse, if that was treated as a health issue and people went to rehab or were given substance misuse support, they wouldn't need to be in prison right. Or if women particularly are in very difficult home situations where they are improperly housed or they're reliant on a partner who is not the best person and will be homeless if they leave that partner, we need systems in place that can support women to have a home, a roof over their head where they are safe in the community, and the support to deal with the myriad levels of trauma that most women in prison have experienced.
Speaker 1:You mentioned earlier the creativity that goes around helping finding solutions and I was wondering what are your views on neurodiversity and creativity and connection with the arts as well?
Speaker 2:I love this question.
Speaker 2:I think that for me, writing is this real creative process that I think is really linked to my ADHD.
Speaker 2:I think I do it because there's this, as I said, this internal noise, this hyperactivity in my brain that I can't express or I've masked and covered up for so long to try and look like a normal functioning human being that I don't know how to express it without writing.
Speaker 2:And I know for others that comes through poetry, painting, creating things. So I think they're intrinsically linked for me, my neurodiversity and my creativity. But I also don't necessarily think that people with neurodiverse conditions are more creative than other people. So it's this real contrast in thoughts and I know they're kind of contrasting and maybe both can't be true at the same time but I do think that people without neurodiverse disorders or conditions, they make amazing art, they can be amazingly creative too, because it is just us all trying to express ourselves, our humanity, who we are, our message. I guess for me it's more that I see creativity as a tool for my neurodiverse brain, but I think everyone can be creative and be incredibly creative. So I don't think there's a kind of hierarchy of who's more creative than the others.
Speaker 1:Yes, going back to what you were mentioning about the self diagnosis, you're saying there seems to be a trend on TikTok of talking about it more, so I was wondering what your view is on that, if there is a danger of this trend of self diagnosing.
Speaker 2:I think my answer to this has evolved over the past few months. So my permanent kind of immediate answer is like no, I don't think it's dangerous. I think the more we try and learn about ourselves, our brains, our wiring, why we do things is great and I think it's important. The part that's evolved is perhaps because ADHD is getting lots of airtime at the moment as the neurodiverse condition. Perhaps people are kind of engaging with that as a self diagnosis when actually there may be something else going on instead, because lots of neurological conditions look very similar If you read the diagnostic manual. Lots of even physiological, specific mental health issues like schizophrenia bipolar they all look very similar.
Speaker 2:So I think there can be a risk in getting your heart set down this path of like okay, I'm self diagnosing myself with ADHD, that getting a diagnosis for ADHD will make my life better and then discounting all other possibilities as well. But I mean on the whole like the medical profession hasn't been doing enough, especially for women and girls. So this is what we have to do. We have to go and try and research ourselves. We have to go and try and find out what's going on ourselves, and I think we're all just doing the best we can with the information we've got. And, anecdotally, past 20 people I've spoken to with ADHD have all taken their research to their doctor themselves and said I would like a referral. No one has had a doctor say to them shall I refer you for ADHD, because I think you might have this?
Speaker 2:So I think we kind of have to self diagnose if we're ever going to find out what's going on in our brains. And also, I just hate these kind of I don't know if I can say this, but what's typically a very middle aged, white, middle class man who's got a column in a newspaper telling me that my experience of the world is not true and my experience of my life is not true and I'm just like jumping on a bandwagon because you don't get any advantage from this. Like I've had to pay thousands of pounds because I had to go private because there was a two year waiting list. I have to take medication that really affects my heart, that affects my blood pressure, that has like long term effects. Like none of this is fun. I'd quite like to just not have this brain. So yeah, so I think that the message I see that it's dangerous. In that regard, I've just learned to try and get less angry about that, because it really annoys me.
Speaker 1:Yes, Angela, you've been so open, sharing so openly about your experience. I wonder how it feels to be thriving so much professionally at least that we know of in spite, if not because of, your diagnosis.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like this question and my first initial response is to be very self deprecating and be like, oh, I'm not thriving, I'm doing okay and actually that's a really silly thing to say and I'm trying to learn to be nicer to myself. That's kind of what this whole ADHD journey is for me. And yeah, I'm doing all right. I've had a book published, I'm doing some good work, it's okay. So there are parts of me that I think, especially before I was diagnosed with ADHD, before I really understood myself to the level I do now I don't think I fully understand myself yet, but to the level I'm at now I think there were parts of myself that it really felt like I was battling against and I think then I would say whatever I achieved was in spite of these things, but it didn't look like thriving and that's just things like not being able to deal with emotions so drinking too much alcohol or not being able to deal with rejection so starting lots of arguments in my relationships and being quite horrible to the people who loved me, or not being able to regulate my anger levels so getting angry all the time. So I would say that even like 10 years ago I looked like that and I wouldn't say any of that was thriving. I think that I would describe myself as thriving now and I don't think I can use because of or in spite of. I think my because of is I'm thriving because I'm learning who I am and I'm learning to understand myself, and that doesn't matter if I've got this really odd little brain that I have or if I had a very neurotypical brain. I think that as long as I understand myself, I am able to manage myself, I'm able to authentically try and do things in my life that bring me happiness and make me content.
Speaker 2:I thought that has like lots of self reflection, that's lots of hard work. That's I mean I, when I worked in prison, I specifically work doing psychological interventions. We did lots of group therapy. I did lots of one to ones and I would always tell everyone like you've got to do therapy, you've got to talk about your feelings. But I never did it myself. It's only, it's only like in the past year that I've started therapy and it's amazing, it's brilliant. I think I was.
Speaker 2:I didn't start therapy because I was really scared and I think I was scared of being vulnerable. I was scared of if I reveal even to myself what's actually going on in my brain. That's really hard, but therapy is brilliant and I think that is part of what helps me to thrive. Because this is the brain I've got. I've got to learn to work with it. I can't kind of I can't sit being sad that my brain works in a bit of an odd way. I need to learn to use it and to roll with it, and when it needs, when it needs space and grace, I have to be able to do that. And when my brain's on the huge, amazing hyper focus that sees me achieving things, I need to ride that as well. So, yeah, I think, I think, yeah. My final answer is yeah, I think I'm going to be able to do that, and I think that is getting to know myself is what is allowing me to thrive.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, angela. Thank you for being so vulnerable, sharing everything from your experience, because I'm sure it will help and be of so much benefit to everyone you touch in your daily life and, as well, to everyone listening. So thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me. This has been lovely.
Speaker 1:And this concludes our podcast for today. We learned so much from Angela about neurodiversity and the importance of recognizing mental health conditions in prisoners. We hope you did too. We at the View oppose all violence against women, and this episode shows that the system requires reform now. If you want to know more about Angela's work, the links are in the description below. Rebel Justice Podcast is produced by the View Magazine, which is the only platform by and for women in the justice system where, by amplifying their stories, we shine a light on injustice, gender inequality and abusive systems. Please visit theviewmagazineorguk and stay in touch via our social media networks.