The Psychiatric Report: Principles and Practice of Forensic Writing, edited by Alec Buchanan, MD, PhD and Michael Norko, MD, MAR, has won the Manfred S. Guttmacher Award from the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law.
The Guttmacher prize is given for an outstanding contribution to the literature of forensic psychiatry. The award and an affiliated lecture were presented in May at the 166th Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association.
Both Buchanan and Norko are associate professors of psychiatry at Yale in the department's Law and Psychiatry Division.
The Psychiatric Report provides both a theoretical background and a practical guide for writing reports, a skill that is central to the practice of psychiatry in legal settings. Among their varied purposes, psychiatric reports may comment on a party's ability to stand trial or inform a court's sentencing decisions.
"The psychiatric report is a very unique document," said Buchanan. "The report must balance medical ethics with a narrative that answers very specific legal questions."
This delicate balance, added Norko, "relies on compassion for your subject. It requires telling an individual's story in a respectful way and keeping the human element at the forefront."
The volume, published by Cambridge University Press, is the first in recent years to focus on report writing as a topic unto itself.
The Law and Psychiatry Division of Yale's Department of Psychiatry is one of the top programs dedicated to training and research within the field of forensic psychiatry.