Forensic psychiatry consultation at a university general hospital

• Autor(a) principal: Provin, Matheus Xavier
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Outros Autores: Telles, Lisieux E. de Borba
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Debates em Psiquiatria (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://revistardp.org.br/revista/article/view/325
• topic: Consultoria; psiquiatria forense; hospital geral; Consultation; forensic psychiatry; general hospital

Psychiatry is one of the medical specialties that most stands out for its relationship with law, and it was in this context that the subspecialty forensic psychiatry emerged, still in the first half of the 19th century. Nevertheless, it was only in the 1990s that this field of study became officially recognized, both abroad and in Brazil. Following the worldwide trend towards an increased presence of psychiatry in general hospitals, and frequent discussions about ethical dilemmas in medicine, in 2015 the Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre (HCPA) pioneered the proposal of a new model of forensic psychiatry consultation. Other similar models have been described and generally date back to the 1980s; the most recent one was described in 2016. In this scenario, we studied 3 years and 7 months of operation of the HCPA model. Preliminary findings indicate a progressive increase in the number of consults, with a 19% increase between the second and third years, and a 31% increase considering the same period from the third to the fourth year. A total of 26 different medical specialties requested consults for different reasons, which were grouped into the following six main groups: evaluation of civil competency; child custody evaluations; diagnostic assessment of personality disorder; diagnosticassessment of factitious disorder/factitious disorder imposed on other/simulation/motivation; violence risk assessment; and sexual violence/abuse assessment. These preliminary results are novel in Brazil, and we expect that they will serve as basis for the planning of assistance to be provided to this population and as a source for future research.