Forensic Mental Health Practice and the Law

Forensic mental health professionals provide a range of services to courts, attorneys, law enforcement agencies, and correctional facilities. Yet despite the importance of understanding the law, most forensic mental health professionals do not have any formal legal training, which can make it challenging for them to develop a sufficient understanding of relevant legal cases, rules, and statutes. Forensic Mental Health Practice and the Law is an up-to-date, scholarly, and comprehensive primer that provides foundational knowledge about the laws most relevant to forensic practice. The authors address topics that are most applicable to forensic mental health professionals in their varied roles as clinicians, researchers, and consultants, including relevant court cases, statutes, court rules, administrative regulations, and ethical standards and guidelines. As they show, having knowledge of the legal system and relevant laws can lead to several benefits for forensic mental health professionals, including increased competence in performing forensic mental health assessments, conducting forensically relevant research, providing consultation to the legal system, and communicating results to legal decision-makers. To this end, the book offers discussion of exemplar state laws that differ markedly from federal law, examples of majority and minority approaches among the states to certain legal topics, and detailed tables that provide citations to the relevant laws in all 50 states.