LAW & PSYCHIATRY RESEARCH
Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic
3811 O'Hara Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

HISTORY
The Law and Psychiatry Program is part of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. This program was founded in 1974 by Loren Roth, M.D., M.P.H. and Alan Meisel, J.D. to serve as a catalyst for interdisciplinary research and practice in the area of law and mental health. During its early years, it provided consultation to units at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic as well as spawning research about patients' rights and treating professionals' responsibilities. Over the years, the program has been committed to providing clear analyses and empirical information to guide the difficult task of providing treatment within the framework of systems responsible for social control.

Over its years of operations, the Law and Psychiatry program has served as the academic home for noted professionals from several disciplines and has developed a reputation for innovative, large scale research on law and mental health topics. Psychiatrists Paul Appelbaum, Jeffrey Geller, and Robert Wettstein all spent formative years of their careers in this program, as did sociologists Charles Lidz and Edward Gondolf, and psychologists Edward Mulvey, William Gardner, and Elizabeth Cauffman. The specific focus of research has shifted over the years along with the interests of its affiliated faculty members, but it has always maintained a commitment to performing sound research at the cutting edge of current issues in the field. In the 1970's and 1980's, faculty in the program published groundbreaking conceptualizations and research on informed consent and other issues of ethics (laying the groundwork for the development of the Center for Medical Ethics at UPMC). In the 1980's and 1990's (and still today), members of the program have pursued an influential line of research on the prediction of violence in mental patients. Recent research has been focusing on the provision of services to juvenile offenders, particularly mentally ill offenders, and the developmental aspects of antisocial behavior. We fully expect that this work will lay the ground work for new forms of service provision and policy in juvenile justice in the future.

The current portfolio of research projects and activities reflects new interests and longstanding collaborations among current and former Law and Psychiatry faculty. Numerous talented staff members have been with the program for years, and it therefore has a solid infrastructure for taking on the operational and administrative challenges associated with large scale, field research. The program's current projects, its ongoing collaborative activities with government entities and social service providers, as well as the potential for working with the new forensic psychiatry training program all bode well for exciting extensions of its rich history.

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