March 27, 2026

On Friday, Dr. Gulrajani and Dr. Fontenele kicked off the meeting with a great talk on the prognosis of PTSD regarding when remission occurs and how to maintain remission. Dr. Resnick then gave an informative talk about confirmation bias and how it affects evidence and expert witness testimony from toxicologists, fingerprint analysts, and forensic odontologists.  He also talked about how if affects medical decision making.  He educated on the 4 types of confirmation bias and possible ways to help mitigate it.  His colleague at Case Western followed him.  Dr. Noffsinger talked about psychological autopsy regarding a suicide vs an accident. He presented a case vignette. In doing so, he noted the difference between cause of death and manner of death.  He discussed various techniques by which one would conduct an autopsy.  Following him were two esteemed colleagues from Mendota Mental Health Institute in Wisconsin.  Drs. Landess and Hume talked about treat to competency issues which they face in Wisconsin. They gave a background of Sell and some of the history in Wisconsin prior to Sell. They pointed that Wisconsin did not make any changes to law after Sell, at least not until 2019 when State v Fitzgerald came out. They also reviewed several subsequent Wisconsin Supreme Court cases since then including State v Green in 2022 and a hot-off-the-presses case of the State v JDB which was decided in February of 2026.  Closing out the day, Dr. Sharif Soliman gave a talk about alternate options for competency restoration in North Carolina. Dana Ervin, an investigative journalist, spoke of an inmate at a jail who was waiting for a bed at a hospital and raised the issue of waitlists.  The state director of forensic psychology talked about the “capacity crisis” as it pertains to staffing shortages, increased referrals, lengthier hospitalizations due to a lack of community resources, and the revolving door problem with the jails such that patients get restored, go back to jail, decompensate, have their competency questioned, and get returned to the hospital). He also talked about some of North Carolina’s initiatives.  There has been a big push for detention based and outpatient based restoration programs, which are new concepts.   Dr. Abate talked about NC RISE (restoring individuals safely and effectively), the patients who are eligible for this program, the structure, the focus, and the discharge planning that this program provides. The goal is to help reduce the revolving door. Dr. Soliman talked about the community restoration program.

March 28, 2026

Dr. Layla Soliman started the day discussing behavioral threat assessment and management (BTAM) in healthcare. She noted that healthcare and social assistance workers are at the HIGHEST risk which increased during COVID. She identified 4 types of violence (criminal, patient/family/visitor, current/former employee, and personal relationship outside of work), the pathway to violence and focused on Patient/family/visitor violence, and various rating scales.  She noted that pairing a scale with an intervention reduces violence. She then switched to premeditated and targeted violence which starts with a grievance. She talked about building a BTAM team and certain trainings. Her colleague, Mark Concordia, discussed Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management (BTAM) and how to build a BTAM team:  security, psychology, psychiatry, legal, and HR, risk management. The 3rd panel member, Dr. Saxton discussed violence risk assessment vs threat assessment. She discussed predicting threat assessment consult. She reviewed 2 cases. In the next lecture, Dr. Marett discussed video voyeurism. He started by defining voyeurism from the DSM and some of its epidemiology. He talked about various jurisdictions and how the evolution of technology has made it easier to engage in this behavior which has consequently skyrocketed. He reviewed several studies and a civil case he is currently involved in.  In the middle of the morning, Dr. Pan discussed use of marijuana. He showed a graphic of every state having some form of legalization (except Idaho). He talked about its increasing potency and frequency of use over the past few years.  He then shifted focus to talk about violence, serious mental illness, and cannabis use noting that there is an increase incidence of violence in the severely mentally ill population.  He also noted that cannabis is the substance most likely to result in developing schizophrenia compared to other illicit substances.

After lunch, Dr. Hatters-Friedman discussed pink collar crimes and the various colored collar crimes (white, blue, green, and red). She noted that “pink collar” was coined in 1980s and that it is not defined by gender per se, just that it is most often perpetrated by women stealing from the workplace. She noted that these women are often low to mid level employees and are bookkeepers, in the PTA, or some sort of office manager.  She then discussed how the costs of these pink collar crimes is underestimated due to not knowing the majority of cases (only 1/6 to 1/3 are reported) and the various biases that allow women to get away with the crime. She reviewed the Fraud Triangle including opportunity, pressure, and rationalization by discussing various cases.  She finished by talking about how these can become red collar crimes which includes the use of violence/suicide to avoid detection. Following her, Dr. Rozel talked about the trends in sadistic online exploitation (SOE) of youth. He discussed despoliation as an ideology and purpose.  He noted that offenders seek the vulnerable (typically 13 year old victims and 16 year old perpetrators) and to destroy. He noted the median age of victims is 13 and perpetrators is 16. He further talked about violent accelerationism, which is discord and chaos through violence for the sake of breaking down systems. He discussed possible indicators of victimization as put out by FBI (nonspecific). More specific are “cut signs” where victim cuts perpetrator’s handle into their skin. He went over how to evaluate the victims and how to help them out of the situation and various interventions.  Dr. Nesbit closed out the conference by talking about the anti anti-social pill. She started out by discussing antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy, comparing the two entities; she noted that there is some overlap between the two, but that they are different.  In discussing antisocial personality disorder, she reviewed conduct disorder and the overlap of callous-unemotional traits that overlap with psychopathy.  She reviewed the neuroanatomy and the genetics of antisocial personality disorder.  She emphasized the overall lack of research on antisocial personality disorder.  She discussed various other historical treatments of antisocial personality which proved to be ineffective and harmful. Her Amin emphasis was that prevention is key and that those with antisocial personality disorder need to be taught how to mentalize to help decrease aggression.