Cincinnati advocates working to get ‘PICS’ named a public health crisis

Families of former inmates and medical college researchers are trying to get a mental health illness named a public health crisis, Cincinnati's Spectrum News 1 reported on July 23. Researchers at the University of Cincinnati are working on a study that surrounds ‘post-incarceration syndrome' or PICS. For years, Chazidy Robinson — the former wife of a prison inmate — said she was bogged down by prison walls that you can't see. “My life revolved around him so much, that in eight years, all I did was answer phone calls, did things that he needed for me to do,” Robinson told Spectrum News 1. It was her then-husband who was locked up, but she said she felt the impact when he got out. Now divorced, she's on a new mission, to send a warning about what she went through. She said she had symptoms of a little-known mental health disorder. “People are being diagnosed right now by a therapist, by a social worker, by a psychologist, because you're saying they have PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. No, I don't, I have post-incarceration syndrome,” Robinson told Spectrum News 1. PICS became the focus of a new idea that she brought to the University of Cincinnati. She went straight to researcher and associate professor in the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Rachael Nolan, Ph.D. MPH. Together they got to work on a study of former inmates, their families and those symptoms of PICS. Nolan said they're trying to get more families into the four-year study and use that information to get PICS named a public health crisis.