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It Takes A Renegade Psychologist To Expose Flawed Psych Reports

    I’ve been writing this newsletter and publishing one issue each month since 2009. This is the 140th issue of my newsletter providing what I feel is valuable information for attorneys and insurance adjusters who read medical-legal reports from psychologists, psychiatrists and neuropsychologists. All of my newsletters can be downloaded for free from my website: DrLeckartWETC.com. The motivation for writing these newsletters has been my 30+ years of evaluating approximately 10,000 personal injury and workers’ compensation litigants and my time as a university professor at San Diego State University, during which it has been no secret that psychologists, psychiatrists and neuropsychologists who write medical-legal reports count on not being called on their errors because it is difficult to find a doctor who is willing to stand up and call them on their mistakes. Perhaps they count on their “fraternity” and “sorority” brothers and sisters in the profession not to make waves. Certainly, they do not expect a renegade doctor like myself to get in their face and testify in court or in written format about the full extent of their incompetent written reporting and/or verbal testimony.

    I have found great pleasure in publishing the issues of my newsletter over the past 11 years during which I have taken on the medical-legal community and focused my attention on helping attorneys win cases by effectively and efficiently cross-examining psychologists and psychiatrists who have authored flawed psych reports. The most substantial error made by doctors of flawed reports is that they fail to provide sufficient data to support their diagnosis. To provide a credible diagnosis the doctor must use at least three sources of information and show that the patient meets the DSM diagnostic criteria for the disorder they diagnosed. First, they must take the patient’s life history, including a complete accounting of their current symptoms or complaints, with a history of their frequency, intensity, duration, onset and course over time. Second, they have to give a Mental Status Examination that measures the patient’s memory, concentration, judgment and insight with a battery of well-known face-to-face administered procedures. Third, they must administer a battery of objective psychological tests that have been demonstrated by published research in peer reviewed professional journals to be both valid and reliable and capable of assessing the examinee’s credibility. Additionally, when available they must review the patient’s records for data confirming their diagnosis and, when available, interview the patient’s friends, relatives and/or co-workers for further substantiation of their diagnosis.

    The conventional psych doctor would shy away from exposing the substantial flaws found in the reports authored by their colleagues, or “fraternity” and “sorority” brothers and sisters. I suppose that makes me unconventional, or what I was recently called (and embraced) by an attorney, a “renegade” in the field! Whatever the appropriate word or phrase, I absolutely love my work in reviewing flawed psych reports and providing adjusters or attorneys a written analysis that discusses every flaw in non-technical jargon and provides the attorney with a script of simple questions to use in cross-examining the report’s author to get their errors on the record.

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