Legal Hearings During Psychiatry Residency

American general psychiatry residents are significantly involved in legal hearings related to mental health. Training to become a psychiatrist involves considerable exposure to medicolegal matters, and psychiatry residents frequently participate in high-stakes legal hearings concerning their patients. Although psychiatry residents are physicians, residents are also trainees who may lack full medical licensure, board certification, or basic preparation to testify in legal settings. Legal hearings are important educational experiences for psychiatrists-in-training, but these proceedings can upend traditional patient-doctor relationships and pose ethics challenges to trainees. In this article, I examine ways in which residency programs can prepare budding psychiatrists for legal testimony. This is an overlooked topic deserving more attention, since the participation of physicians in training in legal hearings carries profound implications for mental health care in the United States.