Ronald Schouten, MD, JD, is the Director of the Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship Program at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC and Director Emeritus of the Law & Psychiatry Service of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). He was previously Director of the MGH/HMS Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship Program. He remains on staff at MGH and is currently an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Schouten is board certified in psychiatry and forensic psychiatry, and is licensed to practice medicine in Massachusetts, New York, California, and the District of Columbia.

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 been a Knowles Scholar in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard College, where he taught a Freshman Seminar entitled “Responsibility, the Brain, and Behavior” and previously taught a seminar on terrorism with Jessica Stern, Ph.D. He co-developed and co-taught the Managing Workplace Conflicts Program for the Massachusetts Medical Society. Dr. Schouten is Forensic Column Co-Editor for the Harvard Review of Psychiatry.

Dr. Schouten 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. He participated in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence Summer Hard Problem Programs entitled “Biological Warfare Perpetrators: Rationality, Culture, and Likelihood of Discovery”(2008) and “Nuclear Attribution in Nuclear Forensics and Intelligence Analysis” (2009) He has presented to government and civilian audiences regarding personnel reliability programs, insider threat, and countering violent extremism and 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”), DTRA and DOE (“Human Reliability/Insider Threat Technical Exchange”), F.B.I. (“Making Prevention a Reality: Identifying, Assessing, and Managing the Threat of Targeted Attacks”), and the Nuclear Threat Initiative (Second China-U.S. Track II Dialogue on Nuclear Security). From 2009 to 2011, Dr. Schouten served as a member of the Amerithrax Expert Behavioral Analysis Panel. He serves as the mental health consultant to threat assessment teams of multiple corporations and educational institutions. He has worked with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston on countering violent extremism programs and is a member of the MassBay Threat Assessment Team based in the Boston FBI Field Office. He participated in the expert panel that produced the 2019 publication “Mass Violence in America” from the National Council for Behavioral Health.

Dr. Schouten is the Immediate Past President of the New England Chapter of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals and now chairs ATAP’s Legislative Affairs Committee. He is the co-author of “Almost a Psychopath: Do I (or Does Someone I Know) Have a Problem with Manipulation and Lack of Empathy” (Hazelden/Harvard Health Publications, 2012) and edited “Mental Health Practice and the Law” (Oxford University Press, 2017.)