Abstract
This handbook provides invaluable guidance on a wide variety of topics ranging from a specimen letter requesting authorisation for the expert to use a laptop computer within a prison, to mental health law in Jersey, which covers the ‘socially inefficient’.
There is a useful chapter on judicial titles and their abbreviations. Rix explains that ‘the form of address goes with the court and not with the person’ (p. 258). Thus he recalls that he had to address His Honour Judge Behrens as ‘My Lord’ when he was sitting as a reporting judge at the Chancery Division, but as ‘Your Honour’ when he was giving evidence before the same judge in the county court.
Readers of this journal will especially appreciate the chapter on reports for personal injury cases in which Rix deals inter alia with ‘nervous shock’, ‘mere mental or emotional distress’ and limitation issues.
The book is enhanced throughout by numerous cases and practice directions together with personal and often humorous anecdotes from the author's own extensive experience as a psychiatric expert witness.
Rix gives lucid guidance on the challenging subject of capacity, explaining both statute and common law aspects and how capacity is task-specific as well as time-specific. The risks of the person making rash decisions or being in danger of exploitation have to be taken into account but on their own they are not determinative of capacity: ‘the task is about comprehension and decision-making, not about wisdom…’ (p. 166).
There is sound advice to psychiatric experts on their demeanour in court and on the need to demonstrate an ability to modify previously held opinions in the light of later evidence or because the expert has misunderstood the legal test. This book was published last year but it has managed to include the decision of the Supreme Court in the case of Jones v Kaney [2011] that experts do not have immunity from suit.
There is a helpful review of the swings of the pendulum in the criteria for liability for damages for psychiatric injury caused by employment stress. Since Dickins v O2 [2008] it has been easier for employees to be awarded compensation for the whole of their psychiatric injury. This means that psychiatrists no longer have to speculate scientistically about what fraction of the injury is due to the employer's breach of duty, so long as it can be shown that there was more than a minimal degree of contributory work-related stress.
However, psychiatrists still have to consider whether the employee would have developed a stress-related disorder in any event, because of their vulnerability as shown by a previous history of mental health problems.
There is also an insightful section on exaggeration and malingering. Identification of the psychiatric disorders encountered in personal injury litigation depends mainly on reported symptoms. Rix reminds psychiatrists that we are extremely poor at detecting deception. Furthermore, a claimant's hostility, defensiveness or lack of co-operation might have been provoked by the expert's overtly sceptical attitude, rather than revealing unreliability and evasiveness.