The mental health of prisoners in the United Kingdom has historically been overlooked. In this interview with true crime author and formerly regular inmate Dave Ginnelly, I attempt to get a clearer idea of what it was like to be imprisoned and placed into segregated units while coping with a mental health issue like depression.

If you haven’t had the opportunity, I do recommend that you give Dave’s books a read. His first book, Wellies and Warders, made it to the top of the Amazon charts for true-crime fiction on its release. He has now also released a sequel called Never a Dull Moment, in which he looks back at his childhood in much greater detail.

Both are available here:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wellies-Warders-My-Personal-Journey/

This is a part of a larger project I am working on, looking into the relationship between the criminal justice system and mental health.

Additional: I am just as aware as anyone that this blog hasn’t been updated in a while, for which I do apologise. I have been somewhat distracted this past year, and haven’t been able to give this blog the full attention it has needed.

In the interests of complete transparency, I have also in that space of time started to work for Coventry & Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust. They are primarily a mental health Trust operating around Coventry & Warwickshire (funnily enough), and over the past year I have worked for both their Staff Engagement and Communications and Marketing teams. I now only work two days a week with Staff Engagement.

I have also recently begun my MA degree in Global Journalism at Coventry University. Originally, I was supposed to be doing Health Journalism, but due to the university’s management decision to cancel the course a few weeks before I started, I made the decision to swap course rather than go through the absolute nightmare of cancelling my student loan.

In future, I plan to use this blog as a space for my articles produced as part of this course. This will still be mostly health-oriented, but due to certain current conflicts of interest (see above), I will be extending the scope to include other work that I am doing as well.

Thanks very much for reading.