PTSD and Malingering: Practice Pointers
There appears to be a dramatic split among mental health professionals who write primarily from a treatment or plaintiff perspective and those who take a more skeptical approach. This article by Steve Rubenzer reviews recent developments in the assessment of malingering, including symptom validity measures, and applies them to the assessment of PTSD. Recommendations for current practice are provided.
Can Psychologists Predict Future Behavior?
I was always taught that psychology is about the description and prediction of behavior. Description? Easy. I can do that! Prediction? Well, er….not so fast. But isn’t description also prediction? If I say that John has an IQ of 100, it is clearly a description, subject of course to a whole bunch of caveats based […]
Court-Involved Therapists
I do a lot of child custody work as well as consultations and second opinions in ongoing child custody cases at Family Court. This provides the opportunity to engage therapists in managing cases as well as observe therapists in action on ongoing cases. (I will address the issue of psychological evaluations later). There is probably no […]
Why are people bad: Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS)
Working in criminal forensic psychology, a lot of attention is devoted to the role of psychosis in criminal offenses. In Hawaii law, based on the Model Penal Code of the American Law Institute, a person is not criminally responsible (insane) when their cognitive and/or volitional capacities were substantially impaired by a physical or mental disease, […]