Foundations of Forensic Mental Health Assessment - JAAPL

Foundations of Forensic Mental Health Assessment

Foundations of Forensic Mental Health Assessment (FMHA) is the first in a series of 20 short and user-friendly books devoted to situations involving criminal, civil, juvenile, and family law that are encountered by forensic mental health clinicians and mental health law professionals. The series is authored by three respected forensic psychologists, who begin this introductory text by summarizing scientific and ethics-based developments in forensic mental health during the past quarter-century. The authors' stated goal is to identify an aspirational best practice paradigm for FMHA that satisfies scientific advancement, ethics and professional standards, and legal relevance. Despite this goal, they repeatedly acknowledge that the aspirational standard may not always be attainable.              

Mental Illness, Criminality, and Citizenship Revisited - JAAPL

Mental Illness, Criminality, and Citizenship Revisited

A central hypothesis of this study was that persons who have experienced such significant life disruptions would have both common and different experiences of citizenship according to the nature of the disruption and that there would be both common and different experiences of citizenship across disrupted groups. By testing this hypothesis, the research team proposed to identify common elements of citizenship and the community integration and inclusion associated with it. The team would also be able to identify areas of citizenship support for persons with mental illness in general, especially those with the dual burden of criminal charges.

Over the course of this citizenship research, some colleagues have criticized the use of citizenship as an applied theoretical framework on the grounds that citizenship is too narrowly associated, in practice, with the political and legal elements of being a citizen.¹¹ The research team believed that a more multifaceted view of citizenship would emerge from this study, including those facets related to civic participation.¹²