Mental Health and the Law

NOTLONG AGO I received a rather urgent call from a librarian at the law school with which I am affiliated. The librarian related his difficulties in helping one of my students with a term paper in the area of “mental health and the law. ” Having come to the conclusion that the resources of our law library-one of the finest and most complete in the nation--were inadequate to the task, he had investigated our Medical Center library with equally unsatisfactory results. The medical librarians had tried to be helpful, but they were essentially unfamiliar with the field o f mental health and the law. In my efforts to assist this librarian, I had occasion to explain that mental health and the law represents a relatively new field whose development has been so rapid that most libraries and librarians have failed to keep u p with it. I further explained the difference between “forensic medicine ” and “mental health and the law, ” clarifying that whereas the former encompasses the intersection of the fields of law and medicine, the latter is made up of the overlapping subject matter of three major disciplines: law, medirine and psychology. It follows that mental health and the law is at onre more multidisciplinary in nature and more specialized in content than the wider field of forensic medicine. In ordcr to illustrate these relationships, I offered the following figure. It depicts the multiple areas of intersection of law, medicine and psychology, including the intersection of all three fields that compose the special subject matter of mental health and the law