Content area
Full Text
Contents
Figures and Tables
Abstract
Feedback to evaluees in forensic mental health assessment (FMHA) is an understudied and underdiscussed topic in the professional literature. In other psychological disciplines, feedback is a traditional part of the psychological assessment process, though there are potential reasons that feedback in FMHA might or should be treated differently. Because feedback will often be a matter of evaluator discretion, we determined that reviewing relevant factors for carefully considered practice could be useful to the forensic evaluator community. Thus, based on the results of three focus groups with forensic evaluators, this article offers guidance and a decision tree to help guide decision making about feedback in FMHA. Although feedback will not be appropriate in every situation, thoughtful consideration of the issue—and providing feedback when appropriate—is one way of respecting the rights and dignity of forensic evaluees.
This article provides concrete considerations for forensic evaluators when considering whether to provide feedback to evaluees. It offers factors to guide idiographic decision making about feedback while highlighting considerations unique to forensic mental health assessment.
Although feedback to the evaluee is a traditional part of psychological assessment in many disciplines, forensic mental health assessment (FMHA) is an exception. For reasons that have been detailed in the many foundational FMHA texts (e.g., Heilbrun, 2001; Melton et al., 2018), there are important ways in which FMHA is not a traditional form of psychological assessment, and, therefore, there are reasons that some traditional practices of psychological assessment do not apply. Feedback is perhaps easily dismissed as one of those practices where FMHA simply creates a blanket exception to a standard rule. We believe, however, that feedback in FMHA should be considered with more nuance.
Fundamentally, feedback is worthy of consideration in forensic evaluations. While evaluees are typically not the clients in forensic evaluations and in many scenarios will not be legally entitled to the report, feedback, when appropriate, respects the rights and dignity of forensic evaluees, consistent with the general principles of the American Psychological Association’s (APA, 2017)