Committee on Psychiatry & Law
The Committee focuses on the intersection between psychiatry and law.
ABOUT OUR COMMITTEE
The purpose of the Committee on Psychiatry and the Law of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry is to further understanding among both professionals and the public regarding issues broadly concerned with the interface of mental health and the legal system.
Composed of psychiatrists who work in both the civil and criminal branches of forensic psychiatry and related fields, the committee’s scholarly output draws upon wide-ranging disciplines including behavioral health, jurisprudence, legal philosophy, ethics, sociology and history to produce an array of books, articles, reports, commentaries and web-based products aimed at grappling with—and, ideally, bringing increased clarity to—the most challenging medico-legal questions in contemporary psychiatry. The committee also remains deeply committed to ensuring that forensic psychiatry is practiced with compassion, equity, probity and to the highest moral, medical and legal standards.
OUR WORK
The Clinician’s Online Guide to Psychiatry & the Law
The Clinician’s Online Guide to Psychiatry & the Law (Landess, Jacqueline & Appel, Jacob M.) Website: https://psychlawgap.com/ (2023).
From Courtroom to Clinic: Psychiatry & the Law Legal Cases that Changed Mental Health Practice (Peter Ash, ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK (2019).
Family Murder Pathologies of Love and Hate Psychiatry & the Law (Susan Hatters-Friedman, ed.), American Psychiatric Association Publishing, Washington, DC (2018).
Friedman SH, Appel JM, Ash P, Frierson RL, Giorgi-Guarnieri D, Martinez R, Newman AW, Pinals DA, Resnick PJ, Simpson AI. “Unsolicited E-mails to Forensic Psychiatrists.” Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry Law (2016).
Kapley, D, Appel JM, Resnick P, et al. “Mental Health Innovations v. Psychiatric Malpractice: Creating Space for ‘Reasonable Innovation,” Faulkner Law Review, (2013-4).
Stalking: A Psychiatric Perspective (Debra Pinals, ed.)
Oxford University Press, New York (2007)
Members: Jacob M. Appel (co-chair), Susan Hatters Friedman (co-chair), Jacqueline Landess, David Cash (consultant), Richard Frierson, Debbie Giorgi-Guarnieri, Richard Martinez, Alan Newman, Debra Pinals, Phillip Resnick, Peter Ash, Renee Sorrentino, Abhishek Jain, Jinit Sanjiv Desai, Ryan Hall
Co-Chairs: Susan Hatters Friedman and Jacob M. Appel MD JD is Director of Ethics Education in Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine and an emergency room psychiatrist in the Mount Sinai Health System. His latest book is a compendium of ethical conundrums, Who Says You're Dead?
Susan Hatters Friedman, MD, MSt, DFAPA, is a forensic and reproductive psychiatrist. Dr. Friedman is past president of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (AAPL), and has served as Chair of the Law and Psychiatry committee at the Group for Advancement of Psychiatry (GAP). Susan currently serves as the inaugural Phillip J. Resnick Professor of Forensic Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University, where she also has appointments in the departments of Pediatrics, Reproductive Biology (Obstetrics/ Gynecology), and Law. Dr. Friedman also continues to serve as honorary faculty at the University of Auckland (New Zealand). She has received the AAPL award for the Best Teacher in a Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship, the Red AAPL award for outstanding service to organized forensic psychiatry, the Seymour Pollack Award from AAPL, the Manfred Guttmacher Award for editing the book Family Murder: Pathologies of Love and Hate with GAP, and the Association of Women Psychiatrists’ Marian Butterfield award for her contributions to women’s mental health.