Thoroughly updated for its Fourth Edition, this award-winning handbook gives mental health professionals authoritative guidance on how the law affects their clinical practice. Each chapter presents case examples of legal issues that arise in practice, clearly explains the governing legal rules, their rationale, and their clinical impact, and offers concrete action guides to navigating clinico-legal dilemmas. This edition addresses crucial recent developments including new federal rules protecting patients' privacy, regulations minimizing use of seclusion and restraint, liability risks associated with newer psychiatric medications, malpractice risks in forensic psychiatry, and new structured assessment tools for violence risk, suicidality, and decisional capacity.

This book is about the competing images of man offered us by the disciplines of law and psychiatry. Michael Moore describes the legal view of persons as rational and autonomous and defends it from the challenges presented by three psychiatric ideas: that badness is illness, that the unconscious rules our mental life, and that a person is a community of selves more than a unified single self. Using the tools of modern philosophy, he attempts to show that the moral metaphysical foundations of our law are not eroded by these challenges of psychiatry. The book thus seeks, through philosophy, to go beneath the centuries-old debates between lawyers and psychiatrists, and to reveal their hidden agreement about the nature of man. Some attention is paid to practical legal and psychiatric issues of contemporary concern, such as the proper definition of mental illness for psychiatric purposes, and the proper definition of legal insanity for legal purposes. This book was first announced, for publication in hard covers, in the Press's January to July seasonal list.

This book is specifically designed for new psychiatrists and all other medical professionals who lack the training necessary to confront the complicated legal and ethical issues that arise at the intersection of the mental health and judicial systems. Written by experts in the field, each chapter begins with a challenging case vignette synthesized from a historical legal case that places the reader in the role of the treatment provider. The text presents details of the legal case, historical significance, and the precedent it set before discussing the core principles of that particular subject area. Each chapter reviews the existing literature and reinforces the most salient points. Topics include risk assessment, substance misuse and the law, legal issues within child and adolescent psychiatry, involuntary medication considerations, and other challenges that are often not sufficiently addressed in training. The text is specifically designed for new psychiatrists and other professionals who are transitioning from their studies into clinical practice, concisely explaining and defining the issues in a practical, reader-friendly tone suitable as both a quick-reference in a busy environment or as a resource for private study. Psychiatry and the Law: Basic Principles is an excellent resource for new psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, students, and other professionals accommodating medical and legal boundaries in clinical practice.

1 copy located in CIRCULATION.

This book examines core issues related to legal insanity, integrating perspectives from psychiatry, law, and ethics. Various criteria for insanity are analyzed and recommendations for forensic psychiatric and legal practice are offered. Many legal systems have an insanity defense, in one form or another. Still, it remains unclear exactly when and why mental disorders affect a person’s moral or criminal responsibility. Questions addressed in this book include: Why should insanity be a component of our legal system? What should be the criteria for an insanity defense? What would be the reasons for abolishing it? Who should bear the burden of proof? Furthermore, the book discusses the impact neurosciences may have on psychiatric and psychological evaluations of defendants as well as on legal decisions about insanity.

Updates to this edition: * Clinical and legal issues in the use of clozapine in treatment of schizophrenia* Clinical information and new cases involving tardive dyskinesia* Changes in civil and criminal law regarding right to refuse treatment* An update of clinical guidelines and legal regulations of ECT* An update on suicide risk assessment and new legal cases involving suicide* An update on violence risk assessment and new legal cases involving the duty to protect endangered third parties* New statutes and criminal sanctions regarding sexual misconduct * New statutes limiting the liability of therapists toward third parties who are injured or killed by patients* Changes in the relationship between psychiatrists and nonmedical therapists* Regulatory developments regarding physician impairment* Numerous tables and an updated glossary of legal terms* New section on common terms and abbreviations in legal citations

The prostitution of the German psychiatric profession into a Nazi inquisitional tool was a major factor producing the total degradation of German medicine and moral ity. Its low point was its psychiatrists killing the patients they were sworn to care for, and its other physicians performing inhuman experiments on patients they were pledged to treat. In America also, psychiatry has been performing some of the functions of an In quisition: injuring innocents, both patients and dissenters, and exculpating crimi nals, terrorists especially. Innocents are being injured both in and out of psychiatric hospitals. The in creased fragmentation of care, the augmentation of its discontinuities, and assign ing the responsibility for organizing it to non-medical managers are some of the fac tors worsening the treatment results of our hospitals. Wrongful deaths, due largely to the specialty's intoxication with drugs while ignoring the importance of common human decency, have become a national scandal.

Psychiatry in Law/Law in Psychiatry, 2nd Edition, is a sweeping, up-to-date examination of the infiltration of psychiatry into law and the growing intervention of law into psychiatry. Unmatched in breadth and coverage, and thoroughly updated from the first edition, this comprehensive text and reference is an essential resource for psychiatry residents, law students, and practitioners alike.