Forensic Psychiatry and Medicine

by Joyce Flory, PhD
Medicine on the Net Vol.5, #7, July 1999, pg. 24

Site: http://www.forensic-psych.com/

Comments: Information and resources on the practice and challenges of forensic psychiatry.

Developed by Harold Bursztajn, MD, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and co-Director of The Program in Psychiatry and the Law at Massachusetts Mental Health Center. This site guides users through the little known world of expert medical and psychiatric opinion and the practice of forensic psychiatry.

Bursztajn explores the formation and benefits of objective medical and psychiatric opinion as well as examples of expertise within managed care and malpractice, employment litigation, and criminal justice and public safety.

The issue of criminal justice, for example, is discussed through links to articles on forensic psychiatry as well as references to specific issues such as diminished capacity, sentencing guidelines, repressed memory, judicial decision making, confessions, jury instructions, and brain syndromes. And the discussion of public safety offers links to documents related to violence prevention, driving, and profiling.

The site also offers resources focused on emotional and physical damages, product liability and toxic tort, family and custody issues, professional ethics, risk management, and telemedicine. And in its What's New section, the site presents a variety of articles from publications as varied as the Boston Globe, Newsday, The New York Times, and The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), as well as Supreme Court cases related to issues such as worker's compensation, sexual harassment, and managed care. Most provocative, however, is Bursztajn's essay, 'Preventing neo-Nazi cult violence in our schools.'