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.

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.

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

Written by two renowned leaders in the field, the much-anticipated fifth edition of Clinical Handbook of Psychiatry and the Law offers mental health professionals authoritative guidance on how today’s law affects clinical practice. Each chapter in this award-winning reference presents case examples of legal issues often seen in day-to-day practice; clearly explains the governing legal rules, their rationale, and their clinical impact; and offers concrete action guides to navigating clinicolegal dilemmas. It’s a must-have resource for anyone in the mental health field who needs an easy-to-read, practical handbook addressing both longstanding legal/ethical issues and crucial recent developments in the field.