The Locked up Living Podcast: Surviving and thriving in prisons and other challenging environments
Can institutional culture challenge your mental health? What if your job makes you feel shame, sadness, grief, disgust and fear? What if you are expected not to feel? Or you are expected to be relentlessly competitive? What it’s like to live or work in a prison? Does working with people who commit murder, child abuse and rape affect people who work in prisons and the wider criminal justice system? How do people survive and thrive when facing significant challenges to our emotional health over a lengthy period? How do we protect ourselves and stay compassionate, loving and trusting? Importantly, how do we find and preserve hope? Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote that “The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons”. In this weekly podcast ,your hosts, David Jones (Forensic psychotherapist) and Dr Naomi Murphy (Consultant Clinical & Forensic Psychologist) hope that exploring less visible aspects of prisons will help listeners see that prisons are a window into society and let us see people not only at their worst but also at their best. We feature a rich range of guests sharing snap shots of life in prisons and take a look at hospitals, schools, sport and the police in order to learn from other institutions. We learn about challenges to human integrity and hear important lessons and heart-warming stories about survival and growth when facing adversity in harsh places. We hope that sharing our conversations can help you make changes to your own relationship with institutions that might challenge your emotional health and well-being. Follow and connect with us and give us feedback. Let us know what you think works, and also what doesn’t. We want you to look forward to the podcast each week. We’ll also be extremely grateful for any reviews that you give us. A simple star or two or a thumbs up will do. Email: lockedupliving@gmail.com or connect with us on: Substack: https://lockedupliving.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/LockedUpLiving Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/naomimurphypsychologist/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-jones-41910b12/ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/lockedupliving/
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Episodes
Friday Jan 15, 2021
Friday Jan 15, 2021
Does everyone who ends up in prison get the same kind of experience? Do all prison environments "feel" the same? Do different kinds of prison settings have a different kind of atmosphere? Why might it be useful to measure the social climate of a prison or to compare and contrast them? Are some environments more compassionate? Does the presence of psychologists or psychotherapists make a difference to how a wing is run? Is prison more effective when it involves a psychological approach?
Gareth Ross and Lucy Reading tell us about their recently published research which describes the social climate across therapeutic and non therapeutic wings in the Category B prison, HMP Gartree
Tuesday Jan 12, 2021
Tuesday Jan 12, 2021
What's it like to work in a prison? Is it any different to working in a secure hospital? Meet the co-hosts of Locked Up Living.
Locked up Living is a Podcast examining aspects of resiliance for those locked up in prisons and hospitals and the staff who look after them. Psychotherapist David Jones and Psychologist Naomi Murphy introduce themselves and talk about their own experiences and how they came to spend their lives working in prisons. This is the preface to a series of interviews from the fields of anthropology, criminology, psychology, psychiarty and psychotherapy and with people whose lived experience gives them a unique and powerful perspective.
Why 'Locked up Living?'
David is a psychotherapist who has worked leading therapeutic communities in English prisons and in Millfields, an NHS forensic setting in East London. Naomi is a Consultant Clinical and Forensic psychologist who was, for many years, clinical lead at The Fens, a treatment programme for serious offenders at HMP Whitemoor. We had both experienced painful and destructive forces in our work and so we set out to discover what things make a positive difference for staff and service users and what is it that makes things go wrong. Of course we found out that there is no easy answer but there are many fascinating and valuable experiences to be heard.