Columbia-Weill Cornell Residency
in Psychiatry and the Law
The Columbia-Weill Cornell Residency in Psychiatry and the Law is a one-year forensic psychiatry fellowship that trains two residents each year. This specialty residency is already widely known as one of the most desirable programs of its kind in the country. The residency program attracts outstanding applicants (three of seven residents to date have been chief residents in their general psychiatry programs) because of the strength of its clinical training, its commitment to public service, and its emphasis on educating fellows about the broader policy implications of their work. The fellows are employed by the New York State Office of Mental Health and work in a number of public institutions to obtain training in both criminal and civil aspects of forensic psychiatry. They are trained to determine whether criminal defendants' psychiatric symptoms interfere with their capacity to stand trial. In addition, they learn to assess insanity acquitees for dangerousness before releasing them into the community. The fellows are also trained to assess the risk posed by violent sex offenders, and to make treatment recommendations aimed at decreasing recidivism. In addition, they treat mentally ill inmates at a maximum-security prison with medication and weekly psychotherapy.
The Residency in Psychiatry and the Law trains its fellows to develop clinical skills with forensic patients and to think in an interdisciplinary framework about the policy implications of their work. Since this is a joint Columbia/Weill Cornell program made possible by the merger of the hospitals, the residency draws on the resources of two great universities. The faculty includes forensic psychiatrists and psychologists, researchers, lawyers, and psychoanalysts throughout Columbia and Weill Cornell. The range and expertise of the faculty, as well as the emphasis on character disturbances in forensic patients, and ethical and policy issues make the didactics in this program absolutely unique.
The Psychiatry and the Law Residents also practice in non-criminal areas. Working closely with students from Columbia University Law School, they provide pro bono services to inner-city children in the foster care system, and teach classes on forensic psychiatry to Columbia University Law School students and psychiatry residents. Furthermore, residents also prepare scholarly papers for publication.
Because of their training, graduates of the residency are prepared to contribute significantly to the resolution of major public policy questions in the area of psychiatry and the law. More broadly, the Residency in Psychiatry and the Law is designed to serve as an educational resource and a kind of "think tank" for the Weill Cornell and Columbia academic communities as a whole. Forensic faculty members are working closely with administrators and law professors at Columbia Law School with an eye to integrating psychiatric perspectives into a wide variety of Law School courses and programs. Ultimately, the program seeks not only to educate individual psychiatrists about the problems faced by forensic patients, but also to stimulate productive interdisciplinary discussion about ways of solving those problems.
