Background: I’m a clinical psychology intern hoping to become a forensic psychologist.
Situation: I was at Court today watching my supervisor testify in a case with a co-intern. We talked briefly with one of the police officers at the Court about who we were and what we were doing.
After Court was dismissed, the co-intern and I were standing in the hallway waiting for our supervisor and a woman who was in the courtroom and apparently overheard our conversation came over to us and thanked us for going to school to become forensic psychologists.
SenoraGO, forensic psychology sounds like a fascinating field. Really, it’s a little disturbing how accurate it can be much of the time.
And, for a person to feel motivated to approach you out of the blue & thank you for choosing to go into the field, you must have made quite an impression on her!
It’s a considerable blessing to feel sure that you’ve chosen the right career.
Brujaja - what’s so odd is that I hadn’t even done anything that could have made an impression on her. I was just sitting in the courtroom during the trial to watch my supervisor testify. My best guess is that she was impressed by him and was happy that co-intern and myself were being trained to fill his role when he reitres.
Threemae - not ignorant at all, there is actually lots of debate on what a forensic psychologist is and what they actually do. I’ll just give you a brief overview of what my supervisors do (and who they work for) because this is the branch of field that I want to break into once I graduate.
Overall, my supervisors do three main types of evaluations for the court: competency to stand trial, criminal responsibility, and sexually violent predator.
In order for a defendant to go trial, they must be competent. In a nutshell, that means that they have to have a logical understanding of court and courtroom proceedings and a rational application of that knowledge. They also must have the ability to assist their attorney in their own defense. So part of the job of my supervisors is to assess for this competency.
Criminal responsibility evaluations center around an examination on the defendant’s mental state at the time of the offense. Generally, these are brought in when a not guilty by reason of insanity (ngri) defense is going to be used.
Our state also has civil commitment of sexually violent predators, and in order for those individuals to be convicted, they must have an assessment to show that they have a mental disease or defect and that because of that mental disease or defect they are “more likely than not” to commit another sexually based crime in the future. So my supervisors are involved in those evaluations as well.
As for who they work for, both of my supervisors are employees of our state. They receive these court ordered evaluations by virtue of the fact that they are the only two forensic psychologists hired by the state to do the evaluations in our zone (the state is divided into several areas). One of my supervisors also has a pretty good private practice going. He is hired privately by some of the prosecuting and defense attorneys in the area to do any of the above evaluations (although I don’t think he actually does the svp evaluations privately). He has also been hired in the past to consult with the attorney’s on some cases.
That is a really brief overview. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask.