The Practical Assessment of Testamentary Capacity and Undue Influence in the Elderly

For all its brevity, this is a remarkably detailed and thorough book that will give the novice, in a highly concentrated form, essentially all that is needed to perform the task set forth in the title. There are some particular features that merit specific mention.

To deal first with the unusual, note that the book has an attached CD-ROM that contains templates of all the major assessment forms that are cited in the text—fortunately, since a significant part of that text involves citations of a plethora of assessment forms.

This approach may represent too much rigor in many cases, especially in those that involve a living testator who can often personally answer extensive questions. Moreover, although form-based data allow confidence about reliability and may be helpful in resisting cross-examination, most fact finders tire quickly of reading a report or hearing testimony that goes into the level of detail provided by formal instruments. From a different perspective, I suspect that this CD supplement is a harbinger of future textbooks and not only in forensic psychiatry: everything often cannot be contained in the written content.

To counterbalance this possibly useful add-on, the book contains no index. This omission is serious for a text that one anticipates using as a longstanding reference work rather than a one-time read-through.

Two important distinctions are not brought out with sufficient clarity. First is that the three components of the testamentary capacity examination are almost always matters of long-term memory; thus, short-term memory impairment would not necessarily affect them significantly. Adults recognize what a will is in early adulthood; we know in general what our assets are as we acquire them; we know who our children are from their birth (or we assume they are ours). Much of these data are concrete in a timeframe that usually predates designing a testament, but there are, of course, exceptions.

Second, I found no reference to the important difference between undue influence and due influence. That is, the evaluator must distinguish between someone who takes unfair advantage of a susceptible testator unduly, per statute, on the one hand, and the natural but legitimate tendency of people to have a favorite relative, charity, or organization on the other.

With these minor objections noted, the book represents a short and useful contribution to an examination that is often, in my consultative experience, misguidedly distorted by preoccupation with diagnosis.

• © 2014 American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law