Psychiatric morbidity among the female inmates of district jail Adyala, Rawalpindi, Pakistan

ABSTRACT OBJECTIVES To estimate the rates of psychiatric morbidity among the female prisoners of district jail Adyala Rawalpindi. METHODS A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted at Central Jail Adyala, Rawalpindi from September 2006 to February 2007. The data was collected in two stages, in stage I initially 176 inmates were accessed; an informed consent was taken followed by collection of demographic details, 48 (27.27%) inmates were excluded. The final sample size was 128 inmates who were screened by using Self-Reporting Questionnaire-24 administered by trained raters. In stage 2, all the inmates scoring above the cut off point of 11 (98) and 1/10 of the low scorers (03) were interviewed using the Present state examination. The data was analyzed using the SPSS version 10. RESULTS In this study 62.5% of the female inmates were found to be suffering from psychiatric illnesses, affective disorders were found in 23.43% of those 19.5% were depressive illnesses, followed by stress related disorders (13.28%), neurotic (anxiety related disorders) (10.15%), somatoform disorders (9.37%), psychotic disorders (3.12%) and organic mental disorders (3.12%). CONCLUSION The present study showed a substantially high psychiatric morbidity (62.50%) among female inmates. The sample size was too small to generalize the conclusion that’s why further research involving larger sample size and longitudinal follow up is required to elucidate the possible perspective.