Foundations of Forensic Mental Health Assessment (FMHA) is the first, introductory volume of a series of 20 books, to be published in next three years, focused on the best practice in forensic evaluation of topics such as criminal, civil and juvenile/family law.

This interesting work has the potential to be a very helpful tool. As Heilbrun, Grisso and Goldstein point out, this book could not have been written ten years ago for lack of information. In this respect, I think that any attempt to improve the general knowledge on a certain topic (or a group of topics as in this case) is praiseworthy. Surely technical fields like the one tackled by the authors do not make it easy for them to try to appeal to non-specialist readers, but, in my non-expert opinion, their effort to make it accessible also to a careful audience new to the subject has been successful to the extent possible. It will be an essential source for the detailed study of each of the 19 topics selected for the other books in the series, but clearly the evaluation that one can give now is necessarily partial.

In Chapter 2 for example (p.29-30) a list of the earliest and subsequent journals pertaining to Law, Psychology and Psychiatry is presented. Such tables will be very useful for readers new to the field but obviously, the “beginner friendly” approach to the topic, based on a scheme full of such basic elements, might not be very intriguing and may even be repetitive for experts in FMHA. Also in line with its introductory role in the series -perceivable throughout the whole volume-, the final chapter of the book is dedicated to describing, insofar as this is possible, the standard settings shared by all the topics to be considered in the later volumes, the basic, common structure of all volumes, along with a brief description of the subjects selected for the project. Out of the five chapters of the book however, I was particularly interested in the fourth chapter where I discovered aspects related to FMHA that I had not considered before reading this work. Specifically, in this part of the volume the authors focus on the principles of FMHA through an intense use of previous literature presented in schematic and very clear tables. Besides the perhaps more obvious considerations to take into account when dealing with mental health assessment, other aspects must be included. For instance, one needs to consider the use of appropriate methods to give relevance to different ethnic/religious/gender backgrounds in selecting the most appropriate model to guide data gathering, as well as considering the need to ensure data protection when collecting information. A final consideration would underline that even in terms of style (the subheadings of the sections are often written in a second person imperative tone) chapter 4 seems to be different from the others, being addressed more directly -and exclusively in some sense- to practitioners of the field than any other chapter.

In conclusion, Foundations of Forensic Mental Health Assessment is a very neat and well-written book that should be of interest to anybody interested in the topic as a valuable introductory volume. However, for the specialist readers who are already aware of the basic notions used in this work instead, this book should be seen as a starter of what really seems to have all the ingredients to become a very satisfactory main course.

© 2009 Mirko Daniel Garasic

Mirko Daniel Garasic, PhD Student, Center for Ethics and Global Politics, LUISS-Guido Carli University, Rome