Kathleen M. Brown and Mary E. Muscari come from nursing backgrounds and wrote their book to educate nurses and other health care professionals about general topics related to forensics. Winner of the 2010 American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award in the area of Gerontologic Nursing, their text has been acclaimed for filling a niche for clinical providers who encounter victims and violent offenders.1 This text supplements a complementary book by the same authors, Quick Reference to Child and Adolescent Forensics: A Guide for Nurses and Other Health Care Professionals.2 The text addresses topics relevant to both physical and mental health forensic assessments.
The book, which begins with an introduction to general principles of violence, is organized into four sections: General Principles, Adults and Older Adults as Victims, Adults and Older Adults as Offenders, and Unnatural Deaths. The last section focuses on medicolegal death investigations, including suspicious deaths in long-term care facilities and deaths by suicide and homicide. Each section includes several independent chapters that can be read in any order. Despite the title, distinct chapters define an older and an elder adult differently, and few chapters distinguish concepts for an adult versus an older adult.
The chapters address topics commonly presented in forensic guides, including evidence, expert witness testimony, intimate-partner violence, stalking, and violence risk assessment, among others. Beyond customary topics, Brown and Muscari also included chapters on professional stress and burnout, victim services, abusive parents, animal cruelty, and parenting while incarcerated.
The chapters are organized to provide definitions, prevalence information, etiology, and classifications and assessment guidelines for the health care provider, followed by therapeutic interventions, prevention guides, resources, and references.
The strength of this text lies in its coverage of physical signs of violence, assessment, and documentation. The chapter, “Principles of Evidence,” deserves special mention for its succinct discussion of how to identify and preserve physical evidence, such as clothing, hair and fiber, and body fluids, and how to maintain the chain of custody. Another chapter lists characteristics of common types of wounds and how to document such injuries. Eight pages of color photographs of physical injuries help to illustrate some important findings in a reader-friendly manner.
In contrast, the guide lacks detail when covering many of the topics relevant to mental health. In addition, several inaccurate statements appear. By way of illustration, in a chapter on guardianship, the authors provide a cursory description of the responsibilities of a guardian. They put forth a best-interest standard without providing any citations and fail to mention the alternative standard of substituted judgment. In a chapter titled “Offenders with Mental Illness and Cognitive Impairment,” in which the authors address the topic of screening assessment tools, they state that there are tools for screening for specific disorders but incorrectly assert that there are no general screening tools. Some mental health providers are likely to take issue with the descriptions of certain mental disorders. In describing schizophrenia, for example, the authors write, “Paranoid schizophrenia is a common concern in criminal justice, as it describes those who hear voices that command them to kill, stalk, or destroy property” (p 249). There is little mention of the variability of illness presentation or of the frequency of occurrence of command auditory hallucinations.
Along these lines, Brown and Muscari are inconsistent in citing references within the body of the text. In several instances throughout the guide, they list specific statistics or data without identifying the source. Although a reference list is included at the end of each chapter, some statements within the body of the chapter are not supported by an identified source.
Despite its limitations, this book may serve as a quick resource for identifying important medicolegal topics that a nurse or other health professional may encounter in providing clinical care. The authors also aptly identify local resources and professional organizations where a provider can turn for more information on select topics.
In summary, the authors accomplish their goal of examining topics in forensic medicine in a concise and easy-to-read format. Nurses and other providers new to the field may benefit from the variety of topics covered. However, for this readership, the book provides little guidance in the practice of forensic psychiatry. That being said, this readership may find it useful and informative to review the findings evident on physical examination and corresponding data collection and documentation associated with physical violence, such as in cases of battery or sexual assault.
- © 2014 American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law
