The Portable Lawyer for Mental Health Professionals: An A-Z Guide to Protecting Your Clients, Your Practice, and Yourself

by Barton E. Bernstein, Thomas L. Hartsell Jr., Barton E. Bernstein JD LMSW

Book Overview

Safeguard your mental health practice with up-to-date information and savvy advice on practicing in today's legal environment Today's mental health professional must approach the legal aspects of practice with both sensitivity and foreknowledge. The array of legal guidelines and ethical standards to comprehend is increasing in scope and complexity. Licensing issues, ethics questions, and malpractice suits all present pitfalls that, if ignored or misapprehended,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471465518
• ISBN13: 9780471465515
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
• Length: 459 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.5" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

every therapist needs this book

The primary author is well known as an instructor of "Family Law" for graduate students of psychology, social work, marriage & family therapy, etc. at several north Texas universities. His courses are always well-received. A previous reviewer commented that a mental health professional would have been helpful. I doubt that would make a difference since so many professionals from various clinical disciplines use these authors as resources. This book is a great adjunct to remind yourself what you need to do as a professional to protect yourself & your clients. While you do not offer legal advice if you are not an attorney, being aware of these issues makes a counselor more likely to recommend that a client see an attorney for advice. Also, re-reading this book on a regular basis reminds us of what we need to continue to do to protect our professional licenses. Often when we are in private practice, just as in other areas of life, we sometimes get lax or forget to attend to all the details necessary to protect us as professionals & our clients. This book is a must for your professional library.

Going into practice? Here's what you must know first.

I stumbled across this book while preparing a project as part of my undergrad Psychology studies at the University of Utah. What a lucky find this is! *** Many statements exist in the world of mental health practice regarding what standards of professionalism, ethicality, conduct, and confidentiality a psychologist should adhere to. Many of them, I've discovered so far, are abstract: they state the standard but give little, if any, illustration on how a practicing therapist applies all that to his/her job and life. This book is the first I've uncovered that gives the clear and understandable picture that I need as an aspiring psychologist. *** I think I understand well enough the general principle that motivated the authors to write this book: all too often, each of us has gotten burned in the past because of some rule, some technicality, some law that would have worked in our favor had we acted with a knowledge of it. For example, I know someone who wouldn't have paid a single cent of his medical bills caused by an on-the-job accident had he simply reported his injury within 48 hours instead of waiting a week. Things like that. I'm always making sure I do things like keep receipts, review credit card statements, and watch what creeps into my college transcripts, because it's the little things that can screw our lives up so badly. All the more so for therapists, the authors believe, because of their heavy responsibility to safeguard their clients' welfare, and because unfortunately their training doesn't seem to prepare them for some types of potential legal trouble. *** As part of that approach, this book takes an interesting departure from other literature on mental health ethics. Despite what the title says, the contents seem to focus not so much on protecting the client--although that principle is by no means diminished--as it does on protecting the therapist. That may seem selfish, but hey, you've got to learn this stuff somehow! *** The authors do an excellent job of explaining a diversity of issues in understandable ways. They use well-constructed scenarios that make you ask yourself, "what would I do if faced with this dilemma?" Then they systematically explain what the options are, and what to avoid along the way. They show you several sample documents along the way that demonstrate how to remove any legal doubts from your practice. The objective is to prevent things from going wrong, but they also discuss when things get ugly, such as a client who commits suicide and the relatives sue you, the therapist, for malpractice. Or when to breach confidentiality and activate your "duty to warn" if a client threatens violence against someone else--or yourself. *** I noted that the authors were both lawyers, and that only one was licensed as a master social worker. I wish, despite their impressive knowledge and experience, that a psychologist might have collaborated with them on this work. I wonder what sort