Forensic Psychiatry

Lawyers frequently encounter clients and/or cases of bizarre behavior, mental illness, substance abuse, psychopathy, sexual offenses, learning disorders, birth defects, and other behavioral and emotional issues. Often they are ill-prepared to understand the nature of the psychiatric report, how the psychiatric assessment was structured, and how to best utilize and challenge these reports in court.Forensic Psychiatry: A Lawyer’s Guide provides legal professionals the tools to identify mentally ill clients and help them navigate through the psychiatric information and language in reports and testimony. Topics include why a forensic psychiatrist is necessary, applications of psychiatry to law, various psychiatric disorders, and utilizing the expert witness.

Vivian Chern Shnaidman’s interest in forensic psychiatry started long before she even knew what forensic psychiatry was. While majoring in Psychology at Bryn Mawr College, she told a friend that she planned to be “the psychiatrist who goes to court and tells everyone what is really happening in the case.” She went on to study medicine at Tel Aviv University, and then returned to the US to train in psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and SUNY Buffalo. She completed a forensic psychiatry fellowship at New York University, and subsequently began practicing forensic psychiatry almost full time. She has worked in a variety of forensic settings, including jails, hospitals for the criminally insane, prisons, and a facility for civilly committed sexually violent predators. She currently maintains a private treatment practice as well as a private forensic practice, currently specializing primarily in civil matters, such as child custody case, domestic abuse, termination of parental rights, testamentary capacity, and a multitude of odd cases that defy description here. Dr. Shnaidman has presented widely on a variety of topics in forensic psychiatry and general psychiatry, including her theory of abusive mothers, psychopathic mothers, immigration evaluations, sex offenders, and other topics. She is a member of several professional associations and is particularly active in the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, which she especially likes because of its interdisciplinary nature. Dr. Shnaidman greatly enjoys travel, and is also a writer of fiction, a long-time married mother of three, and has been known to cook, knit, crochet, and sew during her abundant spare time.