ABSTRACT
Over the past twenty-five years, education and certification in forensic psychiatry have grown more uniform and systematic. In 1982, the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS) and the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (AAPL) cosponsored a report, entitled Standards for Fellowship Programs in Forensic Psychiatry (AAFS-AAPL Joint Committee 1982). That report fostered a common didactic and experiential core in training programs in the United States and Canada. The creation, in 1988, of the Accreditation Council on Fellowships in Forensic Psychiatry (ACFFP), a semi-autonomous component of AAPL, furthered that end by creating a process to distinguish training programs that met the Standards for Fellowship Programs in Forensic Psychiatry from training programs that did not meet the Standards. The ACFFP accredited fellowships from 1989 until 1997. Midway through 1997, the ACFFP was supplanted by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). There has been a corresponding change in nomenclature, i.e., the ACFFP referred to forensic training programs as fellowships, whereas the ACGME refers to forensic training programs as residencies. As of July, 2002, the ACGME had approved thirty-eight forensic residency programs (with a total of ninety-two trainee positions) as meeting its criteria for accreditation (ACGME 2002).
