Kent A. Kiehl, Michael C. Stevens, Kristin R. Laurens, Godfrey Pearlson, Vince D. Calhoun, & Peter F. Liddle Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center, The Institute of Living, Hartford, CT Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Department of Forensic Mental Health Science, Institut...

In forensic psychiatry, there is increasing recognition of the importance of culture and ethnicity in the criminal justice process as the population becomes more culturally diverse. However, there has been little consideration of the role of cultural factors in the trial process for criminal defendants, particularly in the sentencing phase of trial. Using a capital murder case study, this artic...

OBJECTIVES The prevalence and profile of adults with a history of traumatic brain injury (TBI) has not been studied in large North American forensic mental health populations. This study investigated how adults with a documented history of TBI differed with the non-TBI forensic population with respect to demographics, psychiatric diagnoses and history of offences. METHOD A retrospective chart...

For the past 25 years, forensic psychiatry has been concerned with violent offenders with psychosis and/or personality disorder. If dual diagnosis or comorbidity meant anything to a forensic psychiatrist, it would be the ‘typical’ forensic case – an individual with schizophrenia and a premorbid dissocial personality who had been arrested for a violent crime. In this article I use comorbidity to...

The continuous development of forensic sciences has given his contribution to the formation of different kind of highly skilled and specialized scientists who have to work together in order to help judicial authority and police to understand dynamics of a criminal event. These are experts in different fields of traditional sciences, such as chemistry, biology, physics, entomology, but they also...

In recognition of Howard Zonana's contributions, I take stock of the progress of the field of forensic psychiatry over three decades. As forensic psychiatrists, you are the voice of psychiatry in the law and the interpreter of law to your colleagues in psychiatry. I offer provisional impressions of your collective accomplishments under three themes: expertise, influence, and integrity. First, y...

This study was carried out at the Psychiatry and Forensic Medicine Service, Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre (HCPA), Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil. * Psychologist. MSc. in Social Psychiatry, PhD in Medical Sciences: Psychiatry, Schizophrenia Program, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil. ** Occupational therapist. *** Psychiatrist. Professor, Department of ...

The issue of misuse of psychiatry as a means of political coercion is invariably linked to the history of the Soviet Union after the Second World War. It was at the end of Stalin's reign that a system of political abuse of psychiatry was developed, whereby political and religious dissidents were diagnosed to be of unsound mind and sent to psychiatric hospitals, often for many years of torturous...

Psychiatrists working in corrections, particularly in areas that have a shortage of forensic practitioners, may encounter a variety of ethics-related conflicts, especially when working both as clinicians and forensic evaluators within smaller systems. Such conflicts may include unavoidable dual treating and forensic evaluator relationships, and awareness of information that may complicate patie...