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Gender May Affect How Attorneys Deal With Expert Psychiatric Witnesses
Although there are no official data to show whether attorneys deal with female forensic psychiatrists better or worse than they do with male forensic psychiatrists, they do appear to treat them differently sometimes.
Considering that attorneys do not always treat forensic psychiatrists in an exemplary fashion, do attorneys attempt to exploit female forensic psychiatrists more or less than they do male forensic psychiatrists?
The answers are not in yet. But a session on gender and forensic psychiatry at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law in Vancouver in October suggests that attorneys sometimes treat female forensic psychiatrists differently from male forensic psychiatrists.
For instance, Patricia Recupero, M.D., an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University in Providence, R.I., who is also a lawyer, along with Marilyn Price, M.D., an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown, surveyed the AAPL membership to learn more about the role of women in forensic psychiatry.
Eighty percent of the female forensic psychiatrists who participated in the survey reported that, at some point in their careers, they had been asked to serve as an expert witness because they were female. They were, for example, sought out for rape or abuse cases where the attorneys believed that it would be advantageous to their cases to have a female expert testify.
In contrast, only 48 percent of the male forensic psychiatrists who participated in the survey reported that they had ever been asked to serve as an expert witness because they were male.
These were some of the most pronounced findings to emerge from the survey, Recupero and Price pointed out at the session.
Female forensic psychiatrists might view this attorney practice as positive. After all, it means more work for them. Nonetheless, there may be a downside to it—women being hired more for their appearance than for what’s in their heads. That is the concern of Renée Binder, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at the University of California in San Francisco and chair of APA’s Commission on Judicial Action, who also spoke at the AAPL session.
The session also revealed that if things do not go smoothly between female psychiatrists and attorneys regarding money, it may not necessarily be the attorney’s fault. Specifically, Robert Simon, M.D., a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical School in Washington, D.C., reported that in his experience, young female forensic psychiatrists are sometimes afraid of billing attorneys for their true professional worth because they do not want to destroy their relationships with the attorneys.
Binder said that there was a simple solution to this dilemma: "Get over it!"
This advice brought laughter and applause from both male and female forensic psychiatrists attending the session.
After all, Simon stressed, legal battles are about winning, and aggression is rewarded.