Benjamin Silber, Ph.D., ABPP

Thank you very much for that citation, @Daniel Sumner. That's a very interesting consideration on thoughts, memory, and consciousness, @Affra Iftikhar, but it's always best to cite where information comes from! Authors work hard on their material and we want to ensure they are given due credit and that whoever reads this can find additional information in the source material if they choose.

I couldn’t agree more. Due to my work, I consider the issue of bias every single day and it has a very different meaning and significance for me than I think it might for many others because of my work.

Yes, every case is so nuanced and complex. I think the legal system and society in general prefers simple solutions and answers but life is often not so simple, especially within the realm of psychology. Issues on all sides must be carefully considered. I enjoy your thought process and what you’ve been sharing.

I believe @Daniel Sumner hit on one of the biggest differences. TV will always cut out the boring and tedious parts. Waiting for two hours in court to testify can be boring. Spending 8 hours writing a report can be boring. Reviewing records for 10 hours can be boring. Obviously no television show is going to show hour long scenes of psychologists reviewing records and taking notes, but that is often part of the job. The same can be said for police shows. We don't have to watch them write up a 3 page incident report or see them spend 45 minutes going over a surveillance video. Hospital dramas don't drag us through medical record documentation, endless meetings, online trainings for health privacy law information, etc. At the end of the day, all jobs will have boring aspects but television will remove this to make the shows more entertaining and attract viewers.

@Daniel Sumner I also really enjoyed Mindhunter. I wish they had stuck a little closer to the book, but it is a great show with some very fascinating cases.

Haha, yes. For better or worse it can be quite complex. I do enjoy the complexity as it pushes me to learn more and it's intellectually stimulating. You are quite right about DID. Many psychologists argue that DID does not exist or at least does not exist the way it is believed to. There was an interesting court case on DID which is often cited on this issue. Kirkland v. State in 1983 held, "We will not begin to parcel criminal accountability out among the various inhabitants of the mind. Thus it was for very good and considered reasons that the Ohio court said: 'There was only one person [committing the criminal act] . . . and only one person accused [of it]. It is immaterial whether she was in one state of consciousness or another, so long as in the personality then controlling her behavior, she was conscious and her actions were a product of her own volition.'"

You’re welcome. I believe we will see larger and larger shifts over time which will have substantial implications for society in general.

That's a very interesting article, and I enjoyed reading it. I am glad you brought it to my attention. I believe some of the content is geared more toward global criminal justice than the USA specifically where I practice. I found it very interesting because more often in the USA I actually see the opposite in practice (bias negatively impacting men rather than women in the legal system). I suspect that is more unique to the USA and the types of cases that I do, however. I imagine in many countries in which women are imprisoned for abortion, premarital sex, extramarital sex, or immodesty/dress code the situation is remarkably different from what I see in my practice. As a fun fact, a 2015 study from the University of Michigan Law School found that, in the USA, sentences for men are on average 63 percent longer than sentences for women (American Law and Economics Review, Volume 17, Issue 1, Spring 2015, Pages 127–159, https://doi.org/10.1093/aler/ahu010). Although black men had longer sentences than white men, women of all races had shorter sentences than white men for the same crimes. I will add I think there are a number of reasons for this and some of them are justified. I also work in family courts doing some evaluations related to custody issues. Courts in most states in the USA heavily favor mothers taking care of the children as a primary custodian over fathers. While some may see it as stereotyping, bias, or even discrimination to identify a woman more strongly as a parent than a man, this remains common in the USA and is very prominent in these parental cases. Although seeing a woman as a mother more than a man as a father is often seen as discrimination against women in the USA, in custody cases in which both parents want their children, it ends up serving as discrimination against the man. It is given some of this experience I have seen firsthand that I find articles like the one you posted so fascinating. To answer your question, changing laws which unfairly target or discriminate against only women would go a long way in cases where this exists. For men in the criminal justice system, I think changing the way we see men and women would lessen bias and differences in sentencing to some extent. When sentencing is considered, for example, past trauma and abuse are often considered as mitigating circumstances and reduce sentencing. Often a woman who was sexually abused and has a history of trauma and depression is seen with more sympathy and concern (resulting in a lower sentence) than a man might be who has the same background. A woman who has a child is seen sympathetically because the child needs their mother so a lengthy prison sentence seems unreasonable. A man with a child is less often given this same accommodation. Helping judges and juries to understand some of these issues certainly is within the realm of forensic psychologists. @Daniel Sumner, I love some of the stats you put in there. I will add that those numbers are going to continue to significantly skew toward women in the coming years. Most psychology programs in the US are around 80% female. Nearly all forensic psychologists I know who are below the age of 40 are female. As the older generation retires, the female to male ratio will substantially shift and I would not be surprised to see a 4:1 female to male ratio in a decade or two. Women are also going to college at much higher rates than men in the USA so I expect to see significant shifts here across the board. Current data says about 40% of college students are men and 60% are women (meaning 50% more women than men are in college). For those women in college, 50% will graduate. Only 40% of men in college will graduate, further widening the gap in graduation rates. Not only will this change who are the decision makers and influencing policy in the future but it will continue to influence the way we see men and women and their roles. I hope that this shift will reduce bias in understanding what it means to be a man or woman or how best to treat people.

For some of the top training sites, I would consider it very competitive given these sites only accept a few students each year. For the general field, in terms of work, however. I think it’s relatively easy to get into. There is a great deal of need for forensic psychologists. The big challenge is getting the best training and experience.

I absolutely agree with these 6 characteristics. They’re so important.

That’s a very interesting story and question you ask at the end. While I have read much about him and we discussed his clinical work in depth in graduate school (particularly when discussing client centered therapy), I did not know of his CIA connection. It does lead me to wonder a bit about the full nature of his interactions with the CIA and work with them given psychology’s concerning and sometimes unethical history with the CIA in general. To answer your question, I don’t know that I would say it changes my views of his ideas, but it does make me curious about his role in it’s entirety.

Psychological tests are tools and are thus one component of a broader psychological assessment used to make diagnoses. For some disorders like intellectual disability, psychological tests are extremely important (and I would argue they are essential when possible to administer). For other disorders like schizophrenia, however, testing may be far less helpful or effective.

Often the courts, government agencies, businesses, or other entities have to make important legal decisions which in some way relate to person's mental health, mind, behavior, or something else related to psychology. These legal decision makers have little or no training in psychology. Making an important legal decision which hinges on having an expert knowledge of psychology is a challenging task without the requisite expertise. Thus, the role of the forensic psychologist in providing their expertise to the legal decision-maker is quite important. Many such decision-makers heavily rely on the expertise of the psychologist in making well-informed and accurate decisions.

That's a good question. The services section of my website covers some evaluations and what is incorporated in them (and anyone who reads this is free to check them out). There are criminal and civil forensic evaluations. The criminal include issues like fitness to proceed, criminal responsibility, culpable mental state, mitigating circumstances, or capacity to waive Miranda rights. Civil forensic issues include fitness for duty, personal injury, parental fitness, custody, IME, and testamentary capacity. The process of the evaluation typically includes record review, behavioral observations, clinical interview, psychological testing, and collateral interviews.

That's a great question. I think the unsatisfying answer is "it depends." If you give me some specific examples I might be able to give you more details. I will say that many studies are replicated well and shown to have great reliability and support. For those that do not, this may depend on a multitude of factors. Was the same sample used? Was the study replicated decades later? Was the methodology, statistical analysis, setting, participants, or other aspects in any way altered? If so, this could all impact the results. There is also something known as regression toward the mean. If a study gets strong or startling results, it may be something of a statistical anomaly for which later studies will find weaker support for.

Great question, @Eve Fritz! You have struck upon a complex issue which many psychologists, lawyers, and the courts struggle with. As a quick aside, I especially like the point that @Daniel Sumner made about a binary system. The legal system in general is very dichotomous in its thinking whereas psychology sees nearly everything as a possibility on a continuum. This difference in thinking and conceptualization at times results in some friction between the fields. To answer your main question about how psychologists make such assessments, my fairly disappointing answer is "it depends." It depends on quite a few things. One thing is the specific wording or definition of culpable mental state and related terms used by a particular jurisdiction (e.g., the state the crime occurred in). Also unique are the specifics of that case. Different cases may call for different assessment approaches. A third point is the psychologist's own training and experience with such work. For sleepwalking and dissociative amnesia, usually the other two major competing theories are (1) substance use as you mentioned and (2) they are simply making it up. In fact, a very high number of people who commit serious violent crimes report they cannot remember anything about the time of the alleged offenses. A big part of the evaluation for the psychologist is sifting through the information available on the offenses and the person's mental health (often from police records, interrogation videos, video footage, collateral interviews, clinical interview, psychological testing, etc.). The majority of individuals who claim amnesia do, in fact, remember the offense. As for the substance intoxication, in most states this could undermine any mental health defense given voluntary intoxication is not a defense. If the person does not remember what happened, could the intoxication by the most likely explanation? If the person acted out of character or showed poor impulse control or poor judgment, couldn't think be the intoxication? Likely yes. I have thus far only had one sleepwalking murder case I did an evaluation for and the person was not genuinely sleepwalking based on the evaluation. Since you mentioned altered mental states for the legal system, there are a number of avenues to consider. If insanity as a defense is unavailable, there is culpable mental state. If that is unavailable, there are mitigating circumstances. Thus, even if the mental state is inappropriate for or irrelevant to a particular legal issue, there are often others for which it applies.

@Marisa H, in my experience it is fairly rare for conservatorships to be removed. It is much more common for them to simply be transferred from one conservator to another if there was a problem. I have only done one evaluation in which the conservatorship was removed (so far) although it was likely a conservatorship that was never necessary in the first place.

That's really interesting. I will have to take a look at this. I think your concern in your last paragraph has merit. There are studies which have found AI and machine learning tools are often guilty of the same biases as their creators because of the biased information they were provided by the creators or the manner in which the algorithms were structured. Even an otherwise perfect AI would be imperfect if created by imperfect beings (which all of us are).

One area which needs significant attention is the assessment of feigning/exaggeration of a mental disorder in individuals who may genuinely be intellectually disabled. Very few tests are developed for or tested on such individuals. As a result, there is a high false positive rate of "malingering" labels applied by these tests to people who are intellectually disabled when used in clinical and forensic practice. The consequences of this are of course substantial and concerning.

I will share the quote that inspired me to begin this forum and some of my psychology social media. In 1969, George Miller (the president of the American Psychological Association) wrote, "I can imagine nothing we could do that would be more relevant to human welfare, and nothing that could pose a greater challenge to the next generation of psychologists than to discover how best to give psychology away." That statement inspired many psychologists to do their best to share the knowledge the field of psychology had uncovered with the rest of the world. I hope that this forum may do the same. As one of those psychologists in a future generation he referred to, I believe it is my obligation to accept that greatest challenge as best as I can.