A barrage of "handbooks" and "resource manuals" aimed at employers and legal practitioners on the employment rights of people with disabilities has begun to appear. Until now, however, there has been no serious book-length scholarly treatment of how mental disorder can affect work, how work can affect mental disorder, and the role of law in addressing employment discrimination based on mental rather than physical disability. In Mental Disorder, Work Disability and the Law, the editors bring together original work by leading scholars who have studied mental disorder and work disability from the fields of sociology, psychology, psychiatry, law, and economics. The authors' contributions build upon one another to create the first integrated account of the important policy issues at stake when law deals with the rights of mentally disordered citizens to work when they are able to, and to receive benefits when they are not.

This book will be of great value to scholars in law and the mental health professions and to policy makers and the administrators of disability programs.

In courts across the country, judges depend on mental health experts to determine whether mentally disordered people are dangerous. But experts' ability to predict violence is severely limited, and they are wrong as often as they are right. This study reviews two decades of research on mental disorder and offers new empirical and theoretical work that will pave the way for more accurate predictions of violent behavior.

"Essential for all those who are interested in the study of risk assessment of violence. It is particularly important for the researcher in this area. . . . For the clinician who must make violence assessments it is important reading as well."—Stewart Levine, Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law