The American Psychiatric Association will present the prestigious Manfred S. Guttmacher Award to UMass Medical School’s Kenneth L. Appelbaum, MD, and his co-editors for their work on the Oxford Textbook of Correctional Psychiatry, the first comprehensive correctional psychiatric textbook.
“My co-editors and I are delighted to receive this honor. We designed our textbook to provide the first comprehensive overview of the growing field of correctional psychiatry. Having our work selected as this year’s recipient of the prestigious Guttmacher Award from the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law provides noteworthy recognition for hundreds of thousands of incarcerated individuals with serious mental illness and the clinicians who serve them in this country and abroad,” said Dr. Appelbaum, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UMass Medical School. He also is director of correctional mental health policy and research at the Center for Health Policy and Research, a unit within UMass Medical School’s Commonwealth Medicine division.
Appelbaum co-edited the textbook with Robert L. Trestman, PhD, MD, professor of medicine, psychiatry and nursing at UConn Health Care, and Jeffrey L. Metzner, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver. They will receive a plaque and will share a $1,000 honorarium.
“The wide range of topics in our 71 chapters attests to the unique clinical, administrative, cultural, and ethical challenges that face correctional psychiatrists and other mental health professionals. I hope that we have provided our colleagues with a valuable resource. Most importantly, I hope that our book will enhance the care for countless individuals whose needs in the community and in jails and prisons have too often been neglected,” Appelbaum said.
The award is co-sponsored by the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (AAPL) and supported with a grant from Professional Risk Management Services, Inc. It will be presented during the AAPL’s business meeting May 15 at the APA’s annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.
The American Psychiatric Association congratulated Appelbaum, Dr. Trestman and Dr. Metzner for their “outstanding contributions to the literature of forensic psychiatry as editors of the Oxford Textbook of Correctional Psychiatry.”
The Manfred S. Guttmacher Award, established in 1975, recognizes an outstanding contribution to the literature of forensic psychiatry. Guttmacher, AB, MD, was a forensic psychiatrist and chief medical officer for the Supreme Bench of Baltimore City. He was author of “America’s Last King: An Interpretation of the Madness of George III” and other books and papers.