Abstract
Although psychiatry has long protested its inadequacies in predicting violent and dangerous behaviour, the public and the courts continue to cry out for more accurate assessments of dangerousness and for more accountable and objective ways of making such predictions. Not surprisingly, fear of false positives and false negatives, with the latter a potential target for legal accountability has given rise to the field of ‘risk assessment’ and a burgeoning array of assessment tools including semistructured interviews and self-report inventory.
This book, with its self-professed emphasis on clinical assessment would seem to be timely and relevant for those in the forensic arena and the everyday psychiatrist for whom this issue emerges in routine practice. Unfortunately, despite being a comprehensive overview of the scientific literature, the book seems to suffer from presenting more like a textbook summarising the studies themselves, rather than offering much in the way of practical information for the practitioner at the coalface. For this reason, this book would be best suitable to trainees preparing for the written examinations and forensic psychiatrists with an interest in criminal matters.
The chapters which most held my interest, and I suspect would be of more relevance for the clinician, were those dealing with assessing risk for intimate partner homicide or for, parents at risk of filicide and parricide. Particularly in these latter two areas, formal studies are fewer and a ‘feel’ for some of the clinical warning signs shine through in the more personal approach taken by these authors.
Although informative and up-to-date with the current knowledge in this fraught area, the book did generally not hold this reader's attention for more than short spells and would probably not have been read cover to cover were it not for the need to provide a critique. Nonetheless, those with a forensic bent would probably find this a useful resource, particularly those who teach, supervise or work in a correctional field. Overall however, I finished the book continuing with the same thought that I started with; that the prediction of violent behaviour remains elusive in our generation.