Product Description: Once upon a time only forensic psychiatrists had much to do with law and the legal system. Now, hardly a day passes in the life of a clinician without some significant encounter with the interface between the law and the practice of psychiatry...read more

A few months before the final manuscript of this book was sent to the publisher, Dr. Karl A. Menninger died, shortly before his ninety­ seventh birthday. Thus, when I sat down to write this preface, he was very much on my mind. I remembered that it had been almost forty years since he wrote A Manual for Psychiatric Case Study, not one of his well-known but probably the most practical of his books. The psycho­ analytically trained part of me began to wonder what had motivated me to write a book on a topic so similar to that which had earlier drawn the attention of my revered teacher. There is no pressing need for another book on psychiatric evaluation; furthermore, evaluation is a very diffi­ cult subject to write about in a straightforward way. Whatever my unconscious motivations may have been, I hope they were less significant than those of which I was aware. I wrote this book mainly as part of an effort to reverse certain trends in psychiatric educa­ tion. In the last decade psychiatrists have increasingly been trained in an environment that emphasizes brief evaluation of patients and de­ emphasizes teaching about the complexity of human behavior and ex­ perience. Trainees no longer study psychiatric evaluation in a systematic manner. They take fewer intensive histories, fill out forms instead of describing the patient's mental status, and, with rare exceptions, are not taught how to conceptualize biological and psychosocial interactions.

Product Description: Focusing on the clinical and legal issues at the interface of the mental health and criminal justice systems, this monograph examines the identification of mentally disordered offenders by the criminal justice system, the legal theories that justify the diversion of offenders from standard disposition; the practical, ethical and theoretical issues that are of special concern to the clinicians who must diagnose, treat and care for the class; and the emerging legal issues...read more

This monograph focuses on the clinical and legal issues at the interface of the mental health and criminal justice systems. It presents an informative and provocative overview of the various classes of mentally ill offenders and the salient clinical processes.