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New Developments in Legal Systems and Their Impact on Forensic Psychiatry

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Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology in Europe

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Abstract

Forensic psychiatry has well established relations to the legal system, in particular the criminal justice system. The relationship has grown stronger over time and has diversified. It is asserted also that mental health systems in Europe look back on marked progress in the last half century. The relationship between forensic psychiatry and criminal justice has been influenced by theory and research criticizing negative side effects of long-term detention in forensic hospitals and the strong stigma placed on the mentally ill with associating insanity and crime. This in turn had encouraged the development of policies of decarceration, deinstitutionalization, and community-based supervision and treatment [1]. Reform debates on the insanity defense and related law amendments, for example, in Ireland, Scotland, and England/Wales, in fact are still based upon this line of reasoning when attempting to modernize legal language, to bring legal language closer to forensic psychiatry, and, beyond that, to reduce stigmatizing effects which might be associated with the label of “insanity” [2, 3, p. 50].

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  1. Max Planck Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology, Freiburg, Germany

    Hans-Jörg Albrecht

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  1. Antwerp University Hospital, University Forensic Centre (UFC) & University of Antwerp, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Collaborative Antwerp Psychiatric Research Institute (CAPRI), Edegem/Wilrijk, Belgium

    Kris Goethals

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Albrecht, HJ. (2018). New Developments in Legal Systems and Their Impact on Forensic Psychiatry. In: Goethals, K. (eds) Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology in Europe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74664-7_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74664-7_4

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