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Within HMPPS, rates of self-harm and suicide continue to be high. Managing self-harm and suicide in prison is challenging and can have negative impacts on both prison staff and residents. Research has shown that social support, such as contact with friends and family, can reduce the risk of self-harm and suicide. This report presents an overview of the current evidence, bringing together information from a wide range of high-quality academic sources, including peer-reviewed papers, reports, and research with people living in the community. It aims to give a clear outline of the primary evidence and suggest how social support can be applied in a prison setting to inform practice in HMPPS.

The regulation of reproductive function by glucocorticoids occurs at all levels of the hypothalamo-pituitary-gonadal axis. Within the pituitary, glucocorticoids have been shown to directly alter gene expression in gonadotrophs, indicating that these cell types are sensitive to regulation by the glucocorticoid receptor. Whilst the major glucocorticoid metabolising enzymes, 11β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase (11βHSD; HSD11B1 and HSD11B2), have been described in human pituitary adenomas, the activity of these enzymes within different pituitary cell types has not been reported. Radiometric conversion assays were performed in αT3-1, LβT2 (gonadotrophs), AtT-20 (corticotrophs) and GH3 (somatolactotrophs) anterior pituitary cell lines, using tritiated cortisol, corticosterone, cortisone or 11-dehydrocorticosterone as substrates. The net oxidation of cortisol/corticosterone and net reduction of cortisone/11-dehydrocorticosterone were significantly higher in the two gonadotroph cells lines compared with the AtT-20 and GH3 cells after 4 h. Whilst these enzyme activities remained the same in αT3-1 and LβT2 cells over a 24 h period, there was a significant increase in glucocorticoid metabolism in both AtT-20 and GH3 cells over this same period, suggesting cell-type specific activity of the 11βHSD enzyme(s). Stimulation of both gonadotroph cell lines with either 100 nM GnRH or PACAP (known physiological regulators of gonadotrophs) resulted in significantly increased 11β-dehydrogenase (11βDH) and 11-ketosteroid reductase (11KSR) activities, over both 4 and 24 h. These data reveal that gonadotroph 11βHSD enzyme activity can act to regulate local glucocorticoid availability to mediate the influence of the HPA axis on gonadotroph function.

16 non-persisters in an individualized mastery approach of introductory psychology in a community college had significantly higher initial state anxiety than 26 persisters, but there was no significant difference in trait anxiety. Non-persisters were also significantly higher than persisters in attributions for achievement to external context.

First paragraph: Simon Hay, writing A History of the Modern British Ghost Story, suggests we can expect any ‘individual ghost story [to give] an account of a specific and irreducible trauma; some specific haunted mansion, murdered count, or interrupted inheritance’ (2011, p. 2). Hay surveys the British form from from Walter Scott through the twentieth century, and concludes that these specific traumas point, more generally, towards an anxious modernity, where the present has not successfully distinguished itself from its past; indeed, the whole point of the ghost story is that the present cannot wrench free of the past and so has not become fully modern. The ghost story, in other words, holds to a model of history as traumatically rather than nostalgically available to us. (2011, p.15). This is perhaps a fairly common reading of the genre; hidden history uncannily returns and repeats itself. Nevertheless, it’s a reading which struggles to account for a writer like Robert Aickman, who offers narratives that tend to confound this pattern. In Aickman, the source of whatever haunting he describes is usually elided. He is uninterested in accounting for the origins of his ghosts, no ancestral crime is uncovered, nothing as dull as an explanation is offered. Moreover, Aickman’s ghosts emerge in a modern world where precisely the opposite problem to the one described by Hay is considered; the present has been all too easily separated from the past. Continuity and humanity is lost. Modernity threatens to become complete, and it is into this space that ghosts emerge. They are forces which potentially bring disastrous consequences for Aickman’s struggling heroes, but they disturb the equally disastrous power of the present.