Dr. Ronald Schouten was honored by the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society with the 2020 Outstanding Psychiatrist Award for Advancement of the Profession. It was to have been awarded at the Annual Meeting in April (which was postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic). The meeting, and his formal presentation, have been postponed to November.
Ronald Schouten, MD, JD, is Director of the Law & Psychiatry Service and the MGH/Harvard Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship, and an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He has served as a consultant to organizations and expert witness in civil and criminal matters. Dr. Schouten practiced employment law before attending medical school and has combined his legal and medical training to provide consultation and training to a variety of groups and individuals. He has extensive experience as a teacher and consultant in the traditional areas of forensic psychiatry, as well as workplace violence , threat assessment, impaired professionals, and employment discrimination.
Dr. Schouten has helped develop a number of innovations in the teaching of forensic mental health issues, including a judicial grand rounds program , a Harvard Medical School Program for legal professionals, the MGH/Harvard Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship, and numerous teaching programs for the Law & Psychiatry Service and Harvard Medical School. He was a Knowles Scholar at Harvard College, where he teaches a Freshman Seminar, “( Responsibility, the Brain, and Behavior”. He consults to the FBI and other government agencies regarding workplace and campus violence, insider threat, and terrorism. He served as a member of the Expert Behavioral Analysis Panel, conducting a court-ordered study of the investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks. He is president of the New England Chapter of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals and a member of threat management teams for a number of corporations. He is the coauthor of Almost a Psychopath (Hazelden, 2012) and editor of Mental Health Practice and the Law (Oxford University Press, 2017).
