Forensic psychopathology and the evaluation of the damage to psychic integrity: ethical and methodological aspects

Abstract

Over the last decades the expansion of ethical needs has stimulated legislators’ attention to consider people and their fundamental legal rights altogether, free from all merely patrimonial requests, in order to mainly address to personal values. According to this view, the refundable profile also shows itself in favour of a wider and more integral defence of a person as a whole,also aimed at including all the damages that, at least potentially, can affect his/her individual capability of realizing his/her potentialities, in any possible manifestations and expressions (art.2 It. Const.). By facing this task, forensic medicine, and in particular forensic psychopathology, urge a new interdisciplinary synergy among several different sciences, with the contributions of medicine, anthropology, sociology, psychology and philosophy. The appearance of new values, worthy to be defended, leads the Authors, beyond all different nomenclatures and labels linked to the various voices of damage, to verify the validity, and even actuality of an evaluation system that seems to curb forensic psychopathology activities within the narrow toils of a stiff and antiseptic tabular mechanism. As a matter of fact, the real crucial pointoccurs from the awareness that, apart from taking a definite position regarding the different points of view on the evaluation of psychical and/or existential damages, the reassuring and traditionally solid tabular mechanism does not always seem to be fit to properly evaluate this kind of harm. Therefore, according to the Authors the knotting problem to solve is not to establish whether an alteration to psychic integrity is to be referable to a determinate box of pathology-normalcy, but to pick up and analyze, as already before the existential damages, as much information as possible about the negative alterations of the harmful event, able to illustrate its gravity and compatibility with the lesions occurred. The methodological exactness of forensic medicine and, in particular, of forensic psychopathology, must contribute to pay the damage people have unjustly suffered to their psychic integrity, avoiding any disproportions or duplications.