The psychological impact of the Post Office Scandal

The Post Office scandal involved the wrongful prosecution of an estimated 705 Post Office branch managers from across the UK for 'theft' and 'false accounting', when in fact faulty software was to blame. Thousands more branch managers, known as sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses (henceforth 'sub-postmasters'), were wrongfully accused and investigated, but not prosecuted. This scandal, which has been called the "most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history", was catastrophic for many of the victims, with cases of wrongful imprisonment, bankruptcy, marriage breakdown, and suicide. 

But while much is known from previous studies about the mental health impacts of a wrongful criminal conviction, far less is known about the repercussions of a wrongful accusation, write the authors of a recent paper in Legal and Criminological Psychology. Bethany Gowns at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and colleagues now report the findings of the first study to investigate the mental health of branch managers who were caught up in the scandal. This allowed the team to explore how the psychological impact of a false accusation might compare to that of a wrongful conviction. 

A total of 101 former branch managers completed online questionnaires that assessed symptoms of post-traumatic stress and depression, as well as their perceptions of how much social support was available to them, and their levels of unhelpful post-traumatic beliefs. This last scale tapped into feelings of self-blame and negative thoughts about the self and the world.

The team found that around two thirds of these people met the criteria for a probable diagnosis of PTSD, and sixty percent of the sample had clinically significant levels of depressive symptoms. These rates are very high — higher even than those recorded for some other vulnerable groups, including UK frontline workers during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. "These results suggest that victims of the Scandal experience poor mental health at worryingly high levels," the team writes.

Gowns and her colleagues also directly compared questionnaire scores from the 15 participants who had received a criminal conviction with those from the remaining 86. This larger group consisted of branch managers who had been investigated but not charged, or subjected to civil court proceedings, or prosecuted in a criminal court but not convicted. The analysis showed that there were no differences between these two groups. "These findings provide the first evidence that wrongful accusation may be just as damaging to mental health as wrongful conviction," the researchers write. 

A further analysis also revealed that whether or not a participant had received financial compensation made no difference to the psychological impacts. As part of the UK government's response to the scandal, it has offered £75,000 compensation to sub-postmasters who were pursued by the Post Office but not ultimately convicted of any offence. But, as the team writes, this findings suggests that financial compensation does not alleviate the psychological harm of wrongful conviction or accusation. 

The participants' current employment status and their cultural background also had no impact on levels of symptoms of PTSD or depression. However, higher levels of perceived social support did help. This suggests that interventions aimed at providing more social support to people whose lives have been blighted by false accusations and convictions  — such as the establishment of more dedicated support groups — could be beneficial. Teaching these victims how to reappraise negative thoughts may also help to alleviate symptoms. However, there has been no research yet into how effective these approaches might be for people who have been wrongly accused or exonerated, rather than convicted, of a crime, the team notes. This research is urgently needed. 

There are a few limitations to the study. One is that it relied on self-report measures of mental health, rather than formal assessments. Another is that the group sizes were quite small, and the participants may be not be representative of all the sub-postmasters who were affected by the scandal. However, the sheer scale of the scandal did at least make it possible to directly compare groups of people who were all caught up in the same miscarriage of justice but who suffered different outcomes. The fact that it has allowed researchers to identify alarming levels of psychological harm from a wrongful accusation, as well as wrongful conviction, is a small positive to have emerged from a devastating situation. 

Read the paper in full: https://doi.org/10.1111/lcrp.12247