On a therapist serving as a witness.

Therapists (as expressed in codes of ethics) and lawyers (law professors aside) have divergent views about a treating therapist’s serving as a witness, be it as a fact witness or as an expert witness. It is discouraged in the standards of ethics of numerous professional organizations, including the American PsychologyLaw Society and the American Board of Forensic Psychology, the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, the Committee on Psychiatry and Law of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, and the American Psychological Association. In the Ethical Guidelines for the Practice of Forensic Psychiatry of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, it is stated: “Treating psychiatrists should generally avoid agreeing to be an expert witness or to perform evaluations of their patients for legal purposes because a forensic evaluation usually requires that other people be interviewed and testimony may adversely affect the therapeutic relationship.” For psychologists, the American Psychological Association’s code of ethics allows psychologists to serve both as consultant or expert and as fact witness in the same case, provided that they “clarify role expectations.” The American Psychology-Law Society of the American Psychological Association addresses the “potential conflicts of interest in dual relationships with parties to a legal proceeding.” The rationales given for the guideline do not distinguish the type of therapy—psychoanalysis or other talk therapy or pharmacotherapy. Also, under the guideline or rationales, it is immaterial whether the therapist-patient relationship has ended. In an article that received the Manfred Guttmacher Award, Larry Strasburger, Thomas Gutheil, and Archie Brodsky point out that therapists typically have neither the requisite information nor the inclination to validate the historical reality of a patient’s reality. Disclosures in therapy are useful, therapists know, without regard to their objective reality. Strasburger and colleagues write: