This Second Edition of Forensic Psychiatry covers the clinical, legal, and ethical issues for the treatment of mentally disordered offenders for all of the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland jurisdictions. Written by an expert interdisciplinary team from the fields of both law and psychiatry, this is a comprehensive and up-to-date guide which includes clinical observations, guidance, and ethical advice across the psychiatric discipline. The title has been updated with expanded topics on developmental disorders, neuroscience and its use in legal settings, human rights law, dementia, and traumatic brain injury. New legal cases have also been incorporated to reflect changes in legislation, including but not limited to diminished responsibility, deprivation of liberty, and automatism. There are also new parts on forensic psychotherapy, cross-cultural diagnostic validity, and radicalisation. Alongside practical advice on managing clinical and legal situations, the handbook provides concise examples, summaries of relevant legislation, and introductions to different ethical approaches and clinical observations. Uniquely focusing on the interface between psychiatry and law, this title is essential reading for the forensic psychiatrist, as well as lawyers and judges.

Designed as a companion to the Forensic Psychiatry (Oxford Specialist Handbook), Second Edition, this new casebook complements the domains of both theory and practice put forward in the handbook, but also works as a standalone volume for those who wishes to enhance their decision making in cases they may confront in their discipline. Organised into three sections, the casebook allows the practitioner to think through not only the technical medical aspects of real-life clinical cases, but also the legal and ethical aspects. Part A provides an introduction to the theory and practice of decision-making; Part B presents cases across clinical, legal, and ethical domains; and Part C offers frameworks for critiquing decisions. This robustly discursive approach to a fact-based but also value-laden discipline enhances the opportunity to put knowledge into practice. The Oxford Casebook of Forensic Psychiatry expresses the concept that 'knowing is the only part of deciding', offering an essential practitioner's guide to decision making in clinical, forensic, and legal psychiatry.

Until recently, law relating to mental disorder and to the mentally disordered has rarely been the subject of such extensive and heated debate. This book explores and reflects upon this debate. So far the debars focus has been on the tension between public protection and individual civil rights, since much of its impetus has derived from 'notorious' homicides in the community and been directed towards calls for a 'community treatment order'. The debate encapsulated here is more comprehensive, going to the heart of the nature of mental illness and its impacts on legal capacity, juxtaposing constructs which arise out of profoundly differing disciplines.

The book concludes that the contribution of current mental health legislation is both marginal and it seeks to set an agenda for radical law reform by recognizing that asking questions may, at this stage, be more valuable than providing hasty answers. Many of the chapters deal with the recent Bournewood decision in the House of Lords.