Worldwide, forensic psychiatry is an ever-evolving branch of medicine. This development is not coincidental but rather the result of the interaction of many factors. These include the changing attitude of society toward the mentally ill and their treatment from institutions to communities, the potential danger that such differentiation entails, the identification of potential victims of harmful behavior, and the treatment of psychological traumas in cases where the damage is not prevented, among others.
However, more than all these factors, the increase in individual violence observed globally and the need to understand the causes that provoke it, as well as the creation of methods that could mitigate it, are the reasons that have led to this remarkable growth of the field. Forensic psychiatry is a specialization of psychiatry focused on the work of the clinician in specialized psychiatric hospitals, prisons, violence clinics, treatment clinics for victims of physical and sexual crimes, and lastly, the conduct of forensic psychiatric evaluations for criminal and civil cases.
