Violence and Mental Disorder: Developments in Risk Assessment (The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Mental Health and De)

Book Overview

In courts across the country, judges depend on mental health experts to determine whether mentally disordered people are dangerous. But experts' ability to predict violence is severely limited, and they are wrong as often as they are right. This study reviews two decades of research on mental disorder and offers new empirical and theoretical work that will pave the way for more accurate predictions of violent behavior.

"Essential for all those who are interested in the study of risk assessment of violence. It is particularly important for the researcher in this area. . . . For the clinician who must make violence assessments it is important reading as well."--Stewart Levine, Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226534065
• ISBN13: 9780226534060
• Release Date: May 1996
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 334 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.9" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

An Excellent overview of the topic

Monahan & Steadman have provided a comprehensive, emperically based book on one of the most constroversial areas in forensic psychology: the process by which the mentally ill are determined to be "dangerous" in the future. As former critics of this area "Risk Assessment", the authors re-evlaute the reliability and validity of risk assessment methods understanding that such assessments are a fact of life and are used dozens of times every day in this country. By far, this book is the best book out there on this subject.