Why Is Grief Part of Queer Healing? A Social Psychology Podcast Episode.

So we've been in front of British Psychological Society Research Digest, and the first one is, "To be or not to be a prisoner.

Prison can be an isolating e- experience, cut off from friends, families, and everyday life.

Many turn to the people around them for support.

Yet the very identity that can foster connection, being a prisoner, is also one that carries stigma and shame.

Writing in the British Journal of Social Psychology, researchers explore this tension in a study of 157 prisoners across three prisons in northern Italy.

The team were interested in social identity, the part of the sense of, uh, of self that comes from belonging to social groups.

Previous research has suggested that strong social identity can improve well-being by creating a sense of belonging, but it can also have the opposite effect when the group in question is stigmatized." So the interesting thing about this one is also this actually connects to the, um, topic of today's podcast episode, because when being LGBT+ is very stigmatized, people feel shame about it.

People can, uh, feel shame about being a gay, bisexual, lesbian, et cetera.

So I completely, uh, agree, though.

Like, when the social group is stigmatized and when you feel ashamed to be part of, of, like, that group, then it doesn't improve well-being.

Once you've accepted yourself, once you realize that there's nothing wrong with you, then that's when you actually start to get the mental health benefits of being part of a, um, of a social group, even when it's stigmatized, like the LGBT+ community.

So actually, let's flip this on its head.

So if being a prisoner is stigmatized- Then actually, what sort of interventions could we make? Or how could we reframe this? Because yes, because the thing about prisoners, yes, is that like there will be times when people have broken the law just to survive, just to get by.

For example, like if you're living in poverty and if your family's starving, if you want to give your family a better life, but you can't get access to like better paying jobs, you can't get access to more money through legal ways, then a life of crime can be appealing because it will help you feed your family.

It will help you apply a better life for your family, etc.

So yeah, but so I think that when it comes to those sort of like situations and those sort of times where society screwed people over, people have had to resort to like crime.

And I think it's about getting people to accept that, yes, they got caught.

Yes, what they did was wrong, but they did it for the right reasons.

So is that one way to overcome this stigmatization? Possibly.

And then those prisoners might be able to improve their mental health, access the rehabilitation services if a prison applied it.

That's a whole different argument though, because like prison services research shows us that rehabilitation is the only way to reduce reoffending.

So another aspect here is 157 prisoners across three prisons in northern Italy.

So first of all, that is brilliant that they looked at three different prisons because it helps us to understand this is part of a universal behavior rule.

And because if the same behavior shows up in three separate locations, then it can be a sign that this is a universal.

But again, it was only northern Italy.