Forensic Family Therapy: Is the Bridge Too Far?

Virtually all mental health practitioners, at some point in their careers, encounter cases that present legal difficulties. Recognizing these circumstances and heeding the requests from within the legal community, an entirely new practice arena has emerged and flourished in recent decades. While forensic practice is now widely recognized within most of the individually oriented disciplines, it has not yet been developed within the only field that is explicitly identified as relationally oriented. Marriage and family therapists are seldom found in court settings and typically receive limited, if any, training in forensics as a practice specialty. Marriage and family therapists may, as a group, find the requirements for forensic practice incompatible with the philosophy and tenets underlying their field.