[Prognosis of dangerousness in adolescent psychiatry expert assessment].

The clinical assessment and prediction of violent behavior are two of the most important, but also most difficult tasks for child and adolescent psychiatrists who work in the forensic psychiatric area. The purpose of this article is to give an overview about the most prominent aspects of this problem. Therefore the judicial, methodological and methodical basis of the prediction of dangerous behavior is discussed as well as different methods that are used to predict dangerous behavior. It is shown that "dangerousness" is in most cases the result of an interaction between the individual dispositions of a person and a violence-prone situation. Furthermore it is put emphasis on the fact that many psychiatrists are not aware of their own cognitive processes that lead them to a conclusion concerning the dangerousness of a person and also do not use the bulk of the information that is available to them; so many studies showed that dangerousness is judged in the first line in the light of former delinquency and much less in the light of other anamnestic data or the actual behavior. Finally some proposals are made concerning the improvement of the quality of the clinical prediction of dangerousness.