Some Questions for the Field of Violence Risk Assessment and Forensic Mental Health: Or,“Back To Basics” Revisited

Abstract

This paper addresses two related questions: (1) How can we best evaluate and compare clinical and actuarial assessments of dangerousness? (2) Should there not be more systematic qualitative (narrative and descriptive) studies in the field of forensic mental health (including violence risk assessment)? It is argued that adequate studies of both clinical and actuarial assessments of dangerousness have yet to be done, and that more qualitative studies of clinical assessments are necessary to better elucidate and evaluate clinical assessments and to better compare them to actuarial assessments. Furthermore, it is argued, many other areas of forensic mental health are also in need of systematic descriptive (i.e., qualitative and narrative) studies.