A subspecialty of psychiatry practiced at the intersection of law and mental health, defined by the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law as scientific and clinical psychiatric expertise applied in legal contexts involving civil, criminal, correctional, regulatory or legislative matters. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
What It ExaminesCourt-related work including competency to stand trial, defenses based on mental disorder such as the insanity defense, and sentencing recommendations, alongside risk assessment, risk management and the psychiatric care of offenders with mental illness in custody. 1 Formalized YearDates to the 1843 M'Naghten case, whose resulting rule became the first widely adopted legal test for the insanity defense in the English-speaking world. Known LimitationForensic psychiatric opinions on criminal responsibility and on future dangerousness rest on clinical judgment applied to an individual case; professional bodies including the American Psychiatric Association have cautioned that long-range dangerousness predictions are unreliable, and insanity determinations vary with the legal test a jurisdiction applies rather than resting on a single scientific standard. 1 Discipline
Discipline (category)Forensic Psychology / Behavioral 1 Connections
Associated With
Sibling disciplines at the boundary of mental health and law; forensic psychiatry is medical, forensic psychology is not.
Source Forensic Psychiatry (Wikipedia)
Forensic psychiatry, not the broader forensic psychology, is the discipline whose court-related work (competency evaluation, mental-state opinions, criminal-responsibility assessment) most directly examines the insanity defense in practice.
Source Forensic Psychiatry (Wikipedia)
Examines Within
Pioneered By
William Healy founded the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute in Chicago in 1909, the first clinic to bring individualized psychiatric case study to juvenile offenders, a founding institution of forensic psychiatry's clinical practice.
Sources
1. Forensic Psychiatry (Wikipedia)
WikipediaLead section
a subspecialty of psychiatry in which scientific and clinical expertise is applied in legal contexts involving civil, criminal, correctional, regulatory, or legislative matters
Court work section
competency to stand trial (CST), defenses based on mental disorders (e.g., the insanity defense), and sentencing recommendations
- Associated With: Forensic Psychology
- Associated With: Insanity Defense, Mental state opinion section
In Group: Mind and Behavior in Legal Settings, Lead
is a subspecialty of psychiatry related to criminology
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