Alan Goldstein, a Board-certified forensic psychologist on the faculty of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, has collected contributions from experts in the field of forensic mental health on topics intended to reflect some of the frontiers of the field. The resulting volume is an excellent sourcebook for any mental health professional, whether psychologist or psychiatrist, on topics outside the expertise of most practitioners. As Goldstein explains in both the Preface and the chapter that he authored, “Forensic Psychology: Toward a Standard of Care,” which constitutes Part I of nine parts, this book grew out of his work as editor of Forensic Psychology, the 11th volume of the Handbook of Psychology (John Wiley & Sons, 2003) which, in 28 chapters, was intended to address the “mainstream” topics in the field (e.g., trial competence, criminal responsibility, jury selection, and child custody). Drawing a clear line between mainstream and fringe topics proved challenging, in that broad topics such as civil commitment and termination of parental rights were omitted from the previous volume. The current work includes chapters on those areas as well as newer areas of burgeoning practice, with the stated purpose of presenting the “current state of the field in terms of law, ethics, research and practice (p xiv).” Weighing in at over 800 pages with 27 chapters on specific areas (plus Goldstein's general discussion chapter), this book shows just how broad the field has become.
Goldstein, who has won awards for his work as the chair of the Continuing Education Committee for the American Board of Forensic Psychology, recruited contributors who are predominantly Board-certified psychologists with expertise in a range of specialties. Some of the topics are broad explorations of new areas, while others provide more detail on narrow aspects of very specific areas. The contents are arranged in nine parts. Part II, “Forensic Assessment Methodology,” includes separate chapters on the Personality Assessment Inventory, the Rorschach Inkblot Test, the MMPI-2, and Neuropsychology for the Forensic Psychologist. Psychologists who are preparing for expert witness testimony based on their assessments will find in these chapters excellent updates of the research relevant specifically to forensic topics, and psychiatrists with no training in these particular assessment techniques but needing to understand their use would be likely to find these (and many other) chapters excellent sources.
In keeping with the theme of emerging standards of practice in the field, Part II begins with a broader discussion in a chapter, coauthored by Kirk Heilbrun and others, of general principles of forensic mental health assessment first proposed by Heilbrun in his Principles of Forensic Mental Health Assessment (Kluwer Academic/Plenum Press, 2001). These principles include ethics-related considerations (e.g., “Accept referrals only within area of expertise,” p 50) and practical advice (e.g., “Use third-party information in assessing response style,” p 54). The authors go on to describe the application of these principles to practice, such as in the assessment of the quality of forensic evaluations.
This juxtaposition of broad discussions of the changing shape of forensic mental health and information-packed chapters on very specific topics characterizes the entire book. Part III comprises two chapters on ethics (though many chapters include some comment on the ethics-related aspects of the topic at hand), one discussing the handling of third-party information and the other (Paul Lipsitt's “Ethics and Forensic Psychological Practice”) providing an excellent review that would be useful in many senior-level college or first-year graduate level courses in forensic psychology as an introduction to the topic.
Part IV addresses “Civil Forensics,” including a chapter by John Petrila on recent civil decisions (another chapter useful to the forensic mental health professional, regardless of discipline), as well as chapters on the general role of psychologists in civil commitment and on the more narrowly defined areas of evaluating the capacity to consent to treatment and the termination of parental rights.
Part V, “Criminal Forensic Psychology,” also begins with a chapter (by Michael Perlin) about recent court decisions. It includes a chapter on federal sentencing proceedings and one on postconviction assessment. The chapters on recent legal decisions are both excellent but are also cursed with a potentially short shelf life. One imagines the authors holding their breath after submitting these chapters in hopes that the Supreme Court would just stay quiet on mental health rulings for a while, or at least until publication (and, by and large, they did).
In Part VI, the chapter on “Expert Witness Testimony: Law, Ethics and Practice” by Steven Bank and Ira Packer, is an excellent beginner's introduction to the complexities of the activity central to most forensic mental health professionals. The other chapter that analyzes the impact of the laws on malpractice in forensic practice, “Lessons for Forensic Practice Drawn from the Law of Malpractice,” by Stuart Greenberg and Daniel Schuman, is for the more experienced clinician. It is tempting to try to ignore the legal vulnerabilities associated with forensic practice, but this chapter's relatively brief review of the specifics of the limits of witness immunity and of duty, breach of duty, causation, and harm is educational and reassuring (to the ethical professional).
Part VII (“Forensic Psychological Consultation”), addressing the area of consultation, follows the pattern of beginning with a general discussion chapter, which provides a good introduction to the topic for students and nonconsulting practicing mental health professionals, followed by two chapters with narrower focus and greater detail. The chapter on disability assessments in independent medical evaluations is a good example of the application of assessment procedures to a very specialized area, with the implication that this is an area that draws clinicians who become expert in that particular type of assessment. Harley Stock's chapter on consultation in workplace violence is an excellent explication of an emerging topic that has matured in a very short time. He describes the varieties and frequency of workplace violence and legal issues such as the different types of negligent actions from which a quality consultation may protect an employer. The discussion of the current standard for threat assessment and threat management is informative, and Stock offers some emerging theory on calculating the threat level of a given situation.
“Special Populations” are covered in Part VIII, which begins with a very well-written chapter by Randy Borum and Thomas Grisso on the progress and current state of the practice of assessment of juveniles in delinquency cases, including an overview of the course of juvenile justice in general (another excellent chapter for the reading list of college senior or early-level graduate courses). The authors advocate for the importance of conducting forensic assessments of juveniles with a developmental perspective while providing a very even-handed review of the legal decisions relevant to the field. All the chapters in Part VIII provide windows on areas of increasingly well-developed subspecialties, including elder abuse, end-of-life concerns (with some echoes of the earlier chapter in Part IV on the capacity to consent to treatment), correctional psychology, and the role of psychologists in cases of clergy and teacher sexual abuse, from types and frequency of offending to assessing the scale of trauma in victims to determine damages.
The final section, Part IX, comprises three chapters on topics that just don't fit anywhere else and would be considered outside the mainstream of forensic psychology. The surprisingly limited research in how courts use the contributions of forensic mental health professionals is reviewed in “Judicial Decision Making About Forensic Mental Health Evidence.” This chapter is particularly informative on the effects of the decisions in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, 509 U.S. 579 (1993), and Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael, 526 U.S. 137 (1999), on the admissibility of expert witness testimony. The thoughtful analysis by Richard Redding and Daniel Murrie points out that in criminal trials there has been little actual effect of those decisions on the practice of mental health professionals, which nevertheless does not relieve the professional of the burden of practicing in compliance with the standards in Daubert and Kumho.
Part IX also includes chapters on a proposed system of classifying homicides according to the motivation of the offender—an interesting if untested theory—and a chapter summarizing the history of and the difference between clinical and forensic hypnosis. This last chapter (like many others) demonstrates one of the great strengths of this volume: it is a well-written, well-organized, and even-handed review of the research, controversies, and trends in an area well outside the mainstream of forensic mental health and the expertise of all but a few practitioners. Reading one chapter on forensic hypnosis, or independent medical evaluations in disability cases, or capacity to consent to treatment, may not make one an expert in those areas, but the chapters in this volume will give the reader a clear understanding of the state of the art in these emerging topics and expanding roles.
In his introductory chapter, Goldstein describes a book published in 1908, On the Witness Stand: Essays on Psychology and Crime, in which a fellow named Hugo Munsterberg made some rather grand claims about what the science of experimental psychology had to offer the criminal justice system. These claims (as Goldstein describes) were met with considerable scorn in the legal profession. It was some decades before mental health professionals became regular participants in courtroom proceedings, but by 1983, U.S. Supreme Court Justice White wrote for the majority in Barefoot v. Estelle, 463 U.S. 880 (1983), that the disallowing of psychiatric testimony (about future dangerousness, in this case) would be like uninventing the wheel. The field has since undergone such remarkable expansion that the science is barely keeping up with the demand. New areas of practice crop up as fast as some attorney somewhere working on a legal strategy can say, “Let's call a shrink!” In Forensic Psychology, Emerging Topics and Expanding Roles, Goldstein and his coauthors have made a significant and welcome contribution toward the goal of setting and maintaining high standards of practice for the field, even in fringe areas.
- American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law
