Entering Family Law Forensic Mental Health: Student Perspectives
By Alex M. Ray
I.) Introduction
My name is Alex Ray, and I am thrilled to be the inaugural research assistant here at SD Family Services (SDFS). I take great pride in having the opportunity to contribute to the family law scholarly community and serve the SDFS team in this capacity. As an incoming graduate student in psychology, I hope to bring new perspectives to this field, changing how we family law professionals approach, conceptualize, and carry out our work. However, the path to entering and understanding this field has been particularly difficult, resulting from the lack of resources available for students to study Family Law Forensic Mental Health at the undergraduate and graduate levels. In this blog post, I will help distill how I came to understand this field and obtained further experiential learning opportunities. In addition, ideas for future student engagement from related organizational bodies will be discussed.
II.) What is Family Law Forensic Mental Health?
Just what is “Family Law Forensic Mental Health (FLFMH)?” Broadly construed, this field is concerned with the study of families, members of family units, organizations, and larger systems in the context of assessment and intervention regarding interaction with the legal system (Grossman & Okun, 2003). Often, this takes the form of licensed mental health professionals/clinicians (e.g., social workers, mental health counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists) providing expert consultation and evaluation for children and families in the court system. Whether for determinations of child custody, parental capacity, child and sexual abuse, visitation, domestic violence, parenting plans, substance misuse, and more, mental health professionals frequently perform these evaluations for juvenile and family courts and testify to their findings (Tufts Comprehensive Family Evaluation Center, n.d.).
Speaking purely from having gone down the psychology route for my education, I think we psychology students are often led to believe that “forensic psychology” (i.e., psychological science applied to legal systems) solely operates within criminal court contexts – which is simply not the case. It took me a while to unbind this narrative, only stumbling upon FLFMH as a discipline after reading a journal article concerning psychological testing in child custody cases. This article happened to be published in Family Court Review, the interdisciplinary research journal committed to studying the intersection of social science and family law issues. I credit the journal as my formal intellectual introduction to FLFMH, as reading these journal articles helped me grasp the foundations of the field. As a result, I became keenly interested in this discipline, driven by personal experiences and previous academic interests. However, in trying to find experiential opportunities to best serve these new interests, I was initially met with some of the same challenges that halted my knowing of the field in the first place.
III.) Finding Experiential Opportunities at the Undergraduate and Graduate Levels
Experiential opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to learn and become more involved in FLFMH are somewhat scarce. This scarcity makes the journey into the field more difficult and may be a barrier for would-be future practitioners. However, finding opportunities is not impossible. In my sophomore year of undergrad, I obtained my first related experiential opportunity as a volunteer case reviewer at the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF). There, I served on panels to review cases for children who had been placed in foster homes or group homes, discussed progress towards the established goal for each child, and learned about family and probate court processes (Commonwealth of Massachusetts, n.d.). For students in the New England area, this is a great first opportunity to begin conceptualizing how complex child and family dynamics can play out in legal contexts. And for students outside the New England area, there may be programs similar to this in your local DCF or CPS Office.
Having this initial DCF experience was enthralling, but I knew that other learning opportunities more closely aligned with my interests were out there. Since I couldn’t find any institutional opportunities in this domain, I started to contact FLFMH practitioners in private practice. It was actually from this series of cold emails that I was able to get my start at SDFS. One of the private practitioners I contacted happened to be Dr. Premela Deck of SDFS. In explaining my situation, Dr. Deck was immediately kind and sympathetic to my needs, offering me opportunities to grow as a family law professional from the get-go. With SDFS having one of the only robust training programs in the country for FLFMH, Dr. Deck and her team gave me opportunities to learn about administrative duties in FLFMH practice, the complexities of different evaluations they were doing, and even opportunities to help with research manuscripts and presentations. It was in these roles that I truly grew as a thinker and began to develop a professional identity in FLFMH. Students, if you can find a private practitioner who is willing to take you on as an intern and volunteer, the learning opportunities are vast and will greatly inform your understanding of the field and possible careers within it.
IV.) Areas For Future Development
No journey is linear, however, there are many improvements our field can implement to make learning opportunities more equitable for students. First, as noted several times throughout this article, it is difficult to find extracurricular opportunities in this field. I believe beginning with something simple, like a student committee for the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (AFCC), would help start to mitigate these challenges. A consolidated organizational committee where students can converse with peers with similar interests would help in overcoming a lot of these barriers. Moreover, I also think a mentor program with the AFCC would help a lot. Pairing seasoned professionals in the field with budding professionals would not only help students forge paths ahead but also facilitate a dialogue between different generations of practitioners.
In addition, continuing to advocate for more formal clinical training opportunities in our field will also help. For instance, there are only so many clinical postdoctoral fellowships for psychologists in FLFMH, with SDFS being one of the few. The level of importance for FLFMH work cannot be understated, so I hope the number of clinical training programs will continue to rise accordingly. Regardless, entering FLFMH should be more equitable and inclusive to more up-and-coming undergraduate and graduate students. The future of the field should not lie in barriers to access, as I believe this issue is preventable with ideas like the ones presented in this article.
References:
Commonwealth of Massachusetts. (n.d.). About the volunteer case review program. Mass.gov. https://www.mass.gov/guides/about-the-volunteer-case-review-program
Grossman, N. S., & Okun, B. F. (2003). Family psychology and family law: Introduction to the special issue. Journal of Family Psychology, 17(2), 163–168. https://doi.org/10.1037/0893-3200.17.2.163
Tufts Comprehensive Family Evaluation Center | School of Medicine. (n.d.). https://medicine.tufts.edu/about/academic-departments/public-health-community-medicine/tufts-comprehensive-family-evaluation-center-tcfec
