Because suicide is one of the few fatal consequences of psychiatric illness and is a source of extraordinary stress for loved ones and the clinician, accurate assessment of suicidal risk is an essential aspect of the mental health profession. Innumerable individual differences, along with the low base rate of suicide, make assessment a challenging task in clinical practice that is both delicate and time consuming. In this article, the authors recommend examining and incorporating each patient's personal characteristics, dispositional factors, situational factors, and current presentation of symptoms into a unique individual picture of suicidal risk. This portrait of potential for suicidal behavior can, in turn, be used to evaluate risk and design a course of action. This thorough yet concise approach will likely reduce omissions in assessment, and hopefully lead to fewer false negatives and fewer deaths of suicidal patients.

Suicide is the eleventh leading cause of death, accounting for almost 30,000 deaths each year in the United States. The loss of a patient to suicide is the most feared outcome among mental health professionals, while the fear of litigation and liability after such suicide may be a close second. This article will familiarize mental health professionals with the legal issues of professional negligence in suicide cases. We begin with an introduction to malpractice liability for suicidal patients, followed by an explanation of the essential elements of professional negligence and relevant legal terminology. We then discuss general theories of liability involving suicide, and provide illustrative legal case examples. We conclude with a discussion of risk management procedures that can substantially reduce one's exposure to malpractice liability.

Clinicians routinely query factors known to impact cognitive test scores, including age and education. However, without data delineating the impact of less-frequently tracked variables, clinicians are limited to educated inferences about their effect. We explored the relationship of demographics, pastimes, and strategies with cognitive scores in a sample of 499 healthy young volunteers. As expected, age, education, ethnicity, and native language were strongly associated with most tests, while gender and dysphoria were associated with only some. Interestingly, pastimes such as playing number games and word games, and doing activities similar to the tests, were strongly associated with many measures, and testing strategies with almost all. Importantly, at least an additional 50% of the variation in Digit Span Backward and Animals scores was explained by adding covariates about pastimes and strategies to demographic covariates. These results support the utility of querying these elements.

In this article, we describe 8 legal cases reporting the use of the MMPI-A (Butcher et al., 1992) that were identified by an exhaustive search of the Westlaw database. These case studies provide a unique perspective on the uses of the MMPI-A as reflected in documented court decisions. For each case, we first provide a brief discussion of the legal issue or standard of law addressed by the MMPI-A findings. We then provide an abstract of the facts of the case and the nature of the involvement of the MMPI-A. We conclude each case with a more general discussion of the psychological uses and limitations of the MMPI-A as applied to this specific legal issue or standard. Not only do these cases display a wide range of legal issues, but they also provide an excellent opportunity to discuss some important uses and limitations of MMPI-A assessment when used as a component in a forensic evaluation.