The evolution of forensic psychiatry at Yale: a Festschrift honoring Howard Zonana and the discipline of forensic psychiatry.

On April 22 and 23, 2010, the Law and Psychiatry Division of the Yale School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry hosted a tribute to Howard V. Zonana, MD, to acknowledge his contributions to forensic psychiatry in scholarship, teaching, ethics, policy development, and clinical work. In the tradition of a Festschrift, forensic scholars, faculty, and former and current fellows demonstrated Dr. Zonana’s influence on their work. The articles recall Dr. Zonana’s career in the specialty but also hint at the rich evolution of forensic psychiatry from a scholarly experiment into a fullfledged, respected subspecialty that has been defined though established practice guidelines and ethics. An account of his evolving career is also an account of the evolving discipline and its ever-expanding expertise and sphere of influence. Dr. Zonana is forensic psychiatry at Yale, and his story embodies the development of forensic psychiatry at Yale. Dr. Zonana arrived at Yale in 1968 to join the junior faculty in psychiatry with a position in the outpatient clinic, one year before the inception of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (AAPL). At that time, the 10-city-block distance between the medical and law schools at Yale was representative of the chasm that separated the two spheres in scholarship, practice, and influence. Law was law and psychiatry was psychiatry; each was irrelevant to the other in practice and theory. But times were changing. Deinstitutionalization of persons with mental illness was well under way and the effect of O’Connor v. Donaldson in imposing a legal standard for commitment created a demand for both psychiatry and the law to establish practical guidelines for commitment. Dr. Zonana volunteered to work with the law school in developing commitment legislation and in applying the new legal standard to assess the status of persons who had been long-term residents in psychiatric hospitals. That foray into the law laid the early foundation of the Dr. Baranoski is Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Law and Psychiatry Division, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT. Address correspondence to: Madelon V. Baranoski, PhD, Law and Psychiatry Division, Connecticut Mental Health Center, 34 Park Street, Room 157, New Haven, CT 06519. E-mail: madelon.baranoski@ yale.edu.