An estimated two in five people who are incarcerated have a history of mental illness, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Most receive no treatment for their mental health issues during their incarceration in state and federal prisons.
When they are released, these people are often still coping with mental health problems. But care can be equally hard for them to find on the outside, especially while they are struggling to get on their feet.
Yale's Arielle Baskin-Sommers is helping to fill that gap for formerly incarcerated persons in the New Haven area. Baskin-Sommers, a professor of psychology, in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and of psychiatry, at Yale School of Medicine (YSM), has started a mental health care program at the Transitions Clinic in New Haven. Located at the Yale New Haven Health Long Wharf Medical Center, the program is part of a consortium of more than 40 community health centers nationwide that care for recently released individuals. It was co-founded by Emily Wang, a professor of medicine and of public health at YSM.
In her research, Baskin-Sommers focuses on risky and impulsive behaviors, a specialty that makes her especially suited to work with this population. She runs two labs at Yale. One is the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, the largest long-term study of brain development and child health in the United States. Her lab (one of 21 involved in the study nationally) is primarily looking at what environmental and neural factors might predict risky and impulsive behavior later in life.
The other is the Mechanisms of Disinhibition Lab, where she and her students work with adults who have faced severe consequences because of risky behaviors. Most of the participants have been arrested, and at least half have been incarcerated.
"Some of our adult research is mechanism-focused, where we collect behavioral data and neuroimaging data to look at what's really happening in the brain," she said. "The other part of it is we collect as much information as we can about the individual and their interactions with family, friends, and their neighborhood, as well as what state they live in. We are trying to determine what are the accumulation of factors that might lead someone to not only engage in risky, impulsive behavior, but engage in it in a way that is going to impact their life very substantially."
