Director, Law & Psychiatry Service, Massachusetts General Hospital
Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

Ronald Schouten, M.D., J.D., is the Director of the Law & Psychiatry Service of the Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He has served as a teacher, consultant to organizations, and expert witness in both civil and criminal matters. Dr. Schouten has served as a subject matter expert for the Biological Threat Classification Program of the Department of Homeland Security and has testified before the Congressional Subcommittee on Prevention of Nuclear and Biological Attack. He was the mental health liaison for the Association of Trial Lawyers of America to the September 11 Victims’ Fund and served on consensus panels drafting guidelines on workplace violence for the FBI and the American Society for Industrial Security. Dr. Schouten has been a consultant to the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, working with BAU-I on terrorism and campus shooting matters. He was a participant in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) 2008 Summer Hard Problem Program (SHARP) entitled “Biological Warfare Perpetrators: Rationality, Culture, and Likelihood of Discovery” and contributing author to their final paper. In 2008 he was appointed to ODNI’s Biological Sciences Expert Group (BSEG). In 2009, he again participated in SHARP studying “Nuclear Attribution in Nuclear Forensics and Intelligence Analysis.” He has presented to the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, as well as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, on the subject of personnel reliability programs. He has served as a panelist and contributor at workshops sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and Department of Defense (“The Neurobiology of Political Violence: New Tools, New Insights”) and DTRA and DOE (“Human Reliability/Insider Threat Technical Exchange”). From 2009 to 2011, Dr. Schouten served as a member and report co-author of the Amerithrax Expert Behavioral Analysis Panel. The Panel was tasked to examining psychiatric records and investigatory materials related to the 2001 anthrax mailings, in an effort to identify lessons learned from those events and prevent future bioterrorism attacks. 

Dr. Schouten practiced employment law in Chicago before attending medical school and has combined his legal and medical training to provide consultation and training to a wide variety of groups and individuals. He has extensive experience as a teacher and consultant in the traditional areas of forensic psychiatry, as well as special expertise in the areas of threat assessment, violence in the workplace, the Americans with Disabilities Act, impaired professionals, sexual harassment, and organizational consultation. He has developed workplace violence policies and training programs for several major corporations and serves on a number of threat management teams. 

Dr. Schouten has played a key role in the development of a number of innovations in the teaching of forensic mental health issues. These include a grand rounds program on mental health issues for Massachusetts’ judges, a Harvard Medical School Continuing Education Program held for legal professionals, the Harvard Medical School Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship, and numerous teaching programs for the Law & Psychiatry Service and Harvard Medical School. He has served as a consultant and trainer for major corporations in the areas of violence in the workplace and sexual harassment. He has been a Knowles Scholar in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard College, where he teaches a freshman seminar entitled “Responsibility, the Brain, and Behavior.” He helped develop and co-teaches the Managing Workplace Conflicts Program for the Massachusetts Medical Society. Dr. Schouten is Forensic Column Co-Editor for the Harvard Review of Psychiatry. He is a Board Certified Psychiatrist with Added Qualifications in Forensic Psychiatry, a Past President of the Academy of Organizational and Occupational Psychiatry, and is licensed to practice medicine in Massachusetts, California, and New York and is a Member of the Bar of the State of Illinois. In 2008, he was named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. 

Dr. Schouten is the co-author of “Almost a Psychopath: Do I (or Does Someone I Know) Have a Problem with Manipulation and Lack of Empathy” published by Hazelden/Harvard Health Publications in 2012.