Whether assessing general family functioning or specific areas of conflict, professionals preparing child custody evaluations require sound knowledge of three interrelated fields: up-to-date legal issues, psychological findings, and forensic procedures. This book covers these three essential areas to walk readers through the evaluation process clearly and concisely. It further provides a unique combination of legal guidelines with social science research.

Written by an interdisciplinary group comprised of lawyers, judges, psychologists, and adolescent and child psychiatrists, this book identifies and examines the major legal and mental health issues confronted in post-divorce custody and visitation litigation. It examines state legislation and judicial doctrine as well as reform efforts such as the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act and the American Law Institute's Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution. As the authors themselves suggest, "a great many important and difficult divorce-custody legal and psychological issues have not been objectively and thoroughly explored in the literature and in courtrooms -- indeed, many of them have been the subjects of misleading and sometimes ignorant reports and testimony -- and judges and children and their parents have been the losers." The book has been designed to provide a sort of glossary -- an objective description and analysis -- of the underlying mental health aspects of legal issues and mental health professionals' concerns about how those issues are approached and resolved in divorce-custody cases. The book will be useful to practicing lawyers, mental health professionals and judges. "This book is full of practical gems... It would be a useful addition to a family court judge's collection, law firms or practitioners with child custody practice, and an academic law library. It would also be useful to mental health practitioners who work in or advise those who work in the family court system." -- Legal Information ALERT

Contemporary Issues in Family Law and Mental Health is an original and practical discussion of cutting-edge issues in family relations and the law. Through the prism of family law, and custody disputes in particular, it discusses the basic principles that underlie the proper use of mental health evidence in court and it sets out the proper use of mental health evidence in litigation. The first and most important principal is that forensic mental health practice and procedures must track the legal process, not the other way around. The goal of mental health treatment is fundamentally different.

Parental Alienation: The Handbook for Mental Health and Legal Professionals is the essential “how to” manual in this important and ever increasing area of behavioral science and law. Busy mental health professionals need a reference guide to aid them in developing data sources to support their positions in reports and testimony. They also need to know where to go to find the latest material on a topic. Having this material within arm’s reach will avoid lengthy and time-consuming online research. For legal professionals who must ground their arguments in well thought out motions and repeated citations to case precedent, ready access to state or province specific legal citations spanning thirty-five years of parental alienation cases is provided here for the first time in one place. • Over 1000 Bibliographic Entries• 500 Cases Examined• 25 Sample Motions in MS Word Format* *Note: The eBook version contains the additional supplemental materials in PDF format only. It does not contain the MS Word formatted sample motions.

Interest in the problem of children who resist contact with or become alienated from a parent after separation or divorce is growing, due in part to parents' increasing frustrations with the apparent ineffectiveness of the legal system in handling these unique cases. There is a need for legal and mental health professionals to improve their understanding of, and response to, this polarizing social dynamic. Children Who Resist Post-Separation Parental Contact is a critical, empirically based review of parental alienation that integrates the best research evidence with clinical insight from interviews with leading scholars and practitioners. The authors - Fidler, Bala, and Saini - a psychologist, a lawyer and a social worker, are an multidisciplinary team who draw upon the growing body of mental health and legal literature to summarize the historical development and controversies surrounding the concept of "alienation" and explain the causes, dynamics, and differentiation of various types of parent-child relationship issues. The authors review research on prevalence, risk factors, indicators, assessment, and measurement to form a conceptual integration of multiple factors relevant to the etiology and maintenance of the problem of strained parent-child relationships. A differential approach to assessment and intervention is provided. Children's rights, the role of their wishes and preferences in legal proceedings, and the short- and long-term impact of parental alienation are also discussed. Considering legal, clinical, prevention, and intervention strategies, and concluding with recommendations for practice, research, and policy, this book is a much-needed resource for mental health professionals, judges, family lawyers, child protection workers, mediators, and others who work with families dealing with divorce, separation, and child custody issues.

"Mental health professionals increasingly look towards problem prevention at the earliest stage of personal development, yet intervention at that stage is extremely complicated. The difficulties of balancing the conflicting rights of the child (to self-determination), the parents (to raise children in privacy and in their own manner), and of the State (to step in when parents or children fail to meet some socially desirable standard) form the basis of this volume. Its description of the interaction between mental health and legal interests, and how they impinge upon children--areas of rapidly-growing concern to mental health workers--represents the state-of-the-art. Four key topics are tackled: the relationship between children and their families; the health care system; the juvenile justice system; and the educational system. The result is a comprehensive survey of current empirical research, professional practice, and legal policy. In addition, the authors have given provocative suggestions on which direction the field will take--and on which direction they think it should take."--Provided by the publisher