Whores of the Court: The Fraud of Psychiatric Testimony and the Rape of American Justice (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

A whistle-blowing insider, Hagen (psychology, Boston Univ.) rails against forensic psychology and psychiatric practitioners. In her view, the booming business of expert testimony in child custody, criminal rehabilitation, child abuse, and psychological injury/disability cases wastes society's financial resources and yields decisions probably inferior to those that could have been made by the general public. As an "infant" science, she argues, psychology can't provide the answers to the questions posed in such situations. Unfortunately, provocative ideas rest under mounds of verbiage and inflammatory rhetoric here. Legitimate outcome studies that bolster Hagen's conclusions are interspersed with sensational newspaper snippets of particular incidents; oversimplifications and gross generalizations weaken her message. Essentially a political diatribe, this work may be equally useful for consciousness-raising or as fodder for cost-cutting insurance companies, but it is not a necessary purchase for general collections.?Antoinette Brinkman, Southwest Indiana Mental Health Ctr. Lib., Evansville
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

A take-no-prisoners condemnation of psychiatric experts being waved into the witness box, this account trashes psychiatry in general as a quack profession. Hagen (a psychology professor) assails most of the diagnostic tools of the field in her text, which roams among court cases whose outcome hinged on the testimony of mental-health experts. Her fundamental contention is that psychiatry is a junk science whose theories when extended to matters of legal culpability go against common sense. Indeed, Hagen assumes the posture of that legendary legalism, the "reasonable person," and her prose is peppered with exclamations and rhetorical questions like "Who could believe that?" which might annoy as many readers as it might convince about whatever points are in question. Among them are such topically current items as battered-wife syndrome, recovered memory claims, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and urban psychosis claims. The average person could easily encounter in divorce and child custody litigation the situations Hagen vigorously complains of, so her energetic attack could gain considerable attention. Gilbert Taylor

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: ReganBooks; 1 edition (February 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060391979
• ISBN-13: 978-0060391973
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #417,059 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, important and essentially true, September 24, 1998

By	Wolf Roder (Cincinnati, Ohio USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Margaret Hagen is an experimental psychologist who studies human activities. She is very much aware how little we know or can predict about human behavior, and that we know virtually nothing about how the brain works in everyday life. Clinical psychologists, the people who decide about mental illness, treatment, prison confinement, and guilt and innocence in court do not draw on this meager knowledge. Rather, clinical psychology depends on speculations about human behavior going back to Sigmund Freud, and on the intuition of the psychotherapist. In other words, clinical psychology is neither science, nor does it rely on firm knowledge. She refers to therapy and assessment as ineffective, a waste of time. We, the public, the courts, various welfare and other institutions, desperately need to assess and to know what to do with persons, including children, who are emotionally damaged, who commit criminal acts, or are just generally behaving weirdly. Society has empowered the clinical psychologist to make these determinations, to say who is sick, who is guilty, who needs treatment, and how to dispose of the case. The clinical psychologist has no, absolutely no, no kind, of science to base his or her judgement on. We simply do not know how people will behave in future, nor do we understand the working of the brain. "I have said it before, and I will say it again, there are no reliable valid, mental or `behavioral' tests for suspected child abuse worth a damn In this mythology, the individual is an impotent pawn of his environment and upbringing, and the family is more likely pathological, dysfunctional, and damaging. In contrast, "the ideas of free will and moral choice have vanished from the landscape." (p. 306) Clinical psychologists confidently assert that memories of trauma may be repressed, and will cheerfully help a client or witness in a criminal case excavate these repressed memories. This, despite that fact there is no evidence of repression anywhere in the large experimental literature on the subject. People can forget, they can avoid thinking of the unpleasant past, they may scramble memory, but they will not repress it. In clinical psychology children are fragile and have to be protected from the court, from their parents, and from unhappy experiences lest they be damaged forever. Yet, what we know about the brain, is that children heal more, better, and faster than adults, are more resilient, and can cope with adversity better than adults. This is a very interesting book, and, I think, essentially true as well.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars For an important topic, a disappointment , June 13, 2007

By	Ilana Pearl (Brookline, MA United States) - See all my reviews

The topic is an important one, but unfortunately this book doesn't do it justice. It is relatively incoherent and sprinkled with anachronisms about modern clinical psychology. There are no well-thought through arguments explaining why psychology should not be used in its current form in the courtroom, because the information presented about such psychology is so simplistic and biased that it is a straw man's argument to refute. Find other literature on this important issue.

19 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must Have for ANYONE dealing with Psychs and legal battles, October 1, 1999

By	[e-mail] (North Carolina) - See all my reviews

SEND A COPY TO EVERY JUDGE IN YOUR COMMUNITY!! Ms. Hagen has done an OUTSTANDING job of exposing the fallacies of the Psych communities involvement in the legal system. If you are attempting to refute bad "science" this book will help you to understand how to go about it. It will not give you step by step instructions but the understanding of how and WHERE the flaws are will help to create questions and arguments against "SNAKE OIL SALESMEN" (might make a good follow up title?). I am buying a box and sending one to ALL of our judges. They ALL need to know what they are dealing with!