Psychiatry, Psychology and Law articles from April 2004

Psychiatry, Psychology and Law archives from April 2004

Author erratum. (correction to 'Asessing financial competence.', November 2002, p. 248) (Correction Notice)
April 1, 2004... In our article "Assessing Financial Competence" (Webber et al., 2002), which appeared in the 9th vol (issue 2) of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law, we used the term "guardian" rather than the correct term "administrator" to refer to those...

The impact of expert testimony in trials of battered women who kill.
April 1, 2004... Participants (N = 195) were presented with a criminal homicide trial involving a battered woman who had killed her abuser. Within the trial, the presence of expert testimony (battered woman syndrome, social/agency, no expert testimony) was...

Protecting the human rights of the mentally ill: contemporary challenges for the Australian criminal justice system.
April 1, 2004... In 1993 the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) published a landmark report on the findings of a notable inquiry into the human rights of people with a mental illness. The inquiry included a review of issues...

The ethics of therapeutic jurisprudence: a critical and theoretical enquiry of law, psychology and crime.
April 1, 2004... For more than a decade, therapeutic Jurisprudence has informed legal procedures, rules, institutions and actors. Most recently academic and applied criminologists have seized upon this doctrine to interpret the behavior of criminal justice...

Beyond the noise and smoke: some challenges for mental health professionals entering the forensic arena.
April 1, 2004... Clinical practice and forensic mental health reporting are different and can create conflict for mental health professionals. This article discusses some challenges confronting mental health professionals when they enter the forensic arena. It...

A note on the association of bipolar disorders after head injury: causal or coincidental?
April 1, 2004... Historically, clinical reports have led practitioners to consider that bipolar disorders may be causally related to traumatic brain injury. However, a number of lines of enquiry, including more methodologically rigorous studies, have shed doubt...

Third party access to shared electronic mental health records: ethical issues.
April 1, 2004... The move in many countries toward systems of shared electronic mental health records will have major ethical and legal repercussions. This article addresses the ethical issues raised by enabling third party access to shared electronic mental...

The patient-therapist relationship: reliable and authentic mental health records in a shared electronic environment.
April 1, 2004... There are currently a number of initiatives in Australia and internationally that are aimed at sharing patient data among healthcare providers, as well as other third parties. This article analyses the impact of one of these...

Children's "wishes" in the Australian family court: are they wishful thinking?
April 1, 2004... The aim of this article is to reflect on the current practices in family law in Australia in relation to children's participation in the divorce process and to ask whether the legal system is fully acknowledging the extent of children's...

Litigation-induced trauma sensitisation (LITS) - a potential negative outcome of the process of litigation.
April 1, 2004... From a personal, professional and theoretical perspective, the author (a clinical psychologist) proposes that the current practices of litigation after traumatic injury, especially the demand for repeated interviews of victims, actually...

Crime fears and phobias.
April 1, 2004... Is fear-of-crime a crime phobia? Based on the results from the Feelings about Crime Study, it was hypothesised that fear-of-crime has a positive relationship with the anxiety disorders of social phobia, blood injury phobia and agoraphobia. This...

An empirical study on the relationship between intellectual ability and an understanding of the legal process in male remand prisoners.
April 1, 2004... Research conducted in Australia and around the world in the last decade has shown that people with significant intellectual impairments are over-represented in all areas of the criminal justice system. They are particularly over-represented in...

Support for temporary protection visa holders: partnering individual mental health support and migration law consultation.
April 1, 2004... This article calls for the structure of individual mental health support to be built around the processes of seeking asylum and coping with rejections and setbacks during the processes attendant upon applications for refugee status. The author...

Diagnosing evil in Australian courts: psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder as legal synonyms of evil.
April 1, 2004... Australian courts have tended to avoid invoking the concept of evil on the basis that it risks adding a moral and religious dimension to the judicial task of attributing blame. How, then, do Australian courts characterise crimes that sit at the...

Fairness v. privacy: disclosure of documents by guardianship tribunals.
April 1, 2004... This article examines the procedural fairness rules relevant to the disclosure of documents in the jurisdictional context of guardianship tribunal hearings. The article identifies the relevant procedural rules, assesses the |practice in the...

Juvenile recidivism: criminal propensity, social control and social learning theories.
April 1, 2004... Juvenile delinquency is a common precursor to persistent and serious criminal behaviour in adulthood. However, many young offenders will cease offending by early adulthood. Identification of the causal factors that contribute to persistence and...

The influence of gruesome verbal evidence on mock juror verdicts.
April 1, 2004... Judges assume that gruesome evidence can influence juror verdicts. Legal safeguards such as exclusionary evidentiary doctrines are n place to protect defendants against the misuse of visual gruesome evidence by jurors. However little is known...

The role of expert witnesses in psychological blow automatism cases.
April 1, 2004... Automatism is a defence in criminal violence that raises some critical issues about the role of the expert witness in the determination of guilt and innocence. The recent Australian case of R V Leonboyer illustrates some of these issues...

Coercing fitness for trial: mandating efficacious pharmacotherapy.
April 1, 2004... 539 U.S. 166 (2003); 123 S. Ct. 2174; 156 L. Ed. 2d 197 (2003) On rare occasions when the criteria for civil commitment are not established, there may be a clinical view that a patient is too psychiatrically unwell to be able to stand...

Involuntary Detention and Therapeutic Jurisprudence: International Perspectives on Civil Commitment.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... Edited by K. Diesfeld & I. Freckelton (2003). Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Co. 676 pp., UK65 [pounds sterling] Like many new conceptual advances, therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ)has attracted a strong but occasionally mixed press (Freiberg,...

Neither Bad nor Mad: The Competing Discourses of Psychiatry, Law and Politics.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... Deidre N. Greig Jessica Kingsley Publishers, London, 2002, 288 pages, pb. Dr Greig, Fellow in the Department of Criminology at the University of Melbourne, explores the complex legal and political processes that impacted upon the life of...