There are already enough traps and snares in Psychiatry, where ideas and opinions may greatly differ. It is not easy for the psychiatrist to understand and fully comprehend the winding roads of law. This derives also from the intrinsic difficulty of explaining in easy terms to judges, lawyers and jurors such an entangled matter as psychiatry. The psychiatrist is often unable, in the courtroom, to make his position clear and comprehensible. It may happens that the psychiatrist be the scapegoat of the social contradictions and, among them, that of the most heavy, the ineffectiveness of the Health System.
Law needs to be interpreted.
There is more than 7.500 laws in Italy, most of which stem from different social and cultural backgrounds and have been slowly superimposed by historically different social assets. This is a maze to the judge and the lawyer themselves. Results, on the practical side, are disappointing. Both as witness and expert, or also as defendant, the psychiatrist is easily caught in logical contradictions, as the field of legal logic has little to share with the field of human behavior. As witness in the court he is often prone to interpret what did happen, making therefore poor and incomprehensible testimony.