Peter Ash

A Guide for Applying to Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship

The purpose of this article is to provide psychiatry residents and psychiatry residency program training directors an overview of the application process to US forensic psychiatry fellowships. Forensic psychiatry is a fascinating, challenging, and diverse psychiatric subspecialty. Although all Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education (ACGME)-accredited forensic psychiatry fellowships will provide trainees the essentials needed to be competent forensic psychiatrists, a variety of factors (e.g., geography, clinical opportunities, programmatic strengths, case load) are important to consider. This article is written in the vein of similar articles that have appeared in previous issues of Academic Psychiatry on applying to general psychiatry residency programs and child and adolescent psychiatry fellowships [1, 2]. The perspectives within this article include psychiatrists who currently teach forensic psychiatry in academic medical settings (Drs. Daniels, Hearn, Kelly, and McBride) and a current forensic psychiatry fellowship training director (Dr. Ash).

An Annotated Bibliography for the Testifying Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist

To persuade a fact finder that a forensic opinion has a scientific basis, it is often useful to cite professional literature that supports ones opinions or procedures. If the admissibility of ones opinion is challenged in a Daubert hearing, citing literature is almost always required to support the claim that the experts opinion relies on scientific facts or proceeds from scientific methodology. This annotated bibliography provides a sampling of articles that may be useful in bolstering testimony. The sample selected here is not comprehensive, but provides examples of literature that may be cited by forensic child and adolescent psychiatric experts.