The Forensic Psychiatrist of the Future

The rate of change in scientific knowledge and the growing psychiatric sophisti-cation of attorneys and courts have made it increasingly difficult for forensic psychiatrists to retain proficiency in the full spectrum of potential professional activities. As the consumers of forensic services become more sophisticated, forensic psychiatrists have an increasing need to become scientifically informed and a decreasing need to become legally informed. Traditional training in forensic psychiatry, which emphasizes clinical, legal, and institutional knowledge and expe-rience, gives short shrift to behavioral science and other technical knowledge that can enhance the validity of forensic assessments and their value to the legal system and society. Forensic psychiatrists can best respond to these changes and maximize the value of their assessments by narrowing their focus to some subset of the four branches of the discipline: criminal behavior, mental disability, forensic child psy-chiatry, and legal aspects of psychiatric practice. Maximal proficiency in each of these four branches requires a greater depth of knowledge and experience than was once sufficient among those who practiced in all four areas. Fellowship training programs and professional organizations should lead forensic psychiatry into the twenty-first century by organizing their efforts along these four parallel tracks. Forensic psychiatry is in an exciting period of change. We are witnessing in-creasing sophistication among the pro-viders and consumers of forensic serv-ices in many parts of the nation, a proliferation of fellowship training pro-grams, and major increases in the sci-entific data base underlying our under-standing of important forensic psychi-atric concerns, such as offense-specific patterns in criminal behavior, responses to psychological trauma, effects of pa-rental separation on child development