International Association of Forensic Mental Health Services

Keynote Speakers 2026

Linda Gröning

How are mental disorders relevant to criminal responsibility? A legal research perspective

Worldwide, defendants with mental health conditions are treated differently from other defendants. These defendants may be excused from responsibility for otherwise criminalised acts because of their mental state at the time of the offence, where the Anglo-American ‘insanity’ defence is well-known. Moreover, defendants with mental health conditions are increasingly viewed as requiring special compulsory treatment and confinement to prevent future offending. These special legal regimes raise significant concerns, including risks of human rights violations and unequal treatment before the law.

This lecture will address a central challenge that lies in how the law in this area interacts with psychiatry, particularly through the role of forensic experts in criminal proceedings. Criminal insanity and related legal constructs are increasingly tied to psychiatric notions of mental disorder — yet it remains largely unclear why and how these links are established within current criminal justice systems. Psychiatric constructs are not developed for criminal law purposes, and individuals diagnosed with mental disorders display widely varying types and degrees of functional impairment. However, it remains largely unclear how legal practices across different jurisdictions reflect this complexity. This represents a substantial problem for society and the rule of law, and it also presents complex challenges for research. In her lecture, Linda Gröning will discuss the key issues in this field and how she seeks to address them through cross-country, legal empirical, and multidisciplinary investigations.

Bio

Linda Gröning is Professor of Law at the University of Bergen and a researcher at the Centre for Research and Education in Forensic Psychology and Psychiatry at Haukeland University Hospital in Norway. She holds a visiting professorship at the Faculty of Law in Lund, Sweden, within the Lund University Global Excellence Programme. Gröning’s research focuses on criminal law and criminal responsibility, with particular emphasis on how criminal law addresses individuals with mental health conditions, among whom children constitute a particularly vulnerable group. Gröning leads the Research Center for Criminal Justice and Agency, which includes the RCN projects DIMENSIONS, CHILDCRIM, PROTECT, and COMPLEX (ERC CoG). She also chairs the Norwegian Criminal Law Commission.

Michael Seto

Understanding and Preventing Online Sexual Offending

Internet technologies have only been widely available to the public for the past 33 years, with the first major internet service providers (e.g., AOL) and the first internet browser (Mosaic) in 1993. Since then, Internet technologies have transformed how we connect, communicate, and share content. This has had many individual and social benefits and it is sometimes hard to imagine a life without Internet technologies for work, school, and entertainment. But Internet technologies have also facilitated committing crimes, including sexual crimes. In this presentation, I provide an overview of major advances and challenges in how forensic and correctional services can respond to the dramatic increase in online sexual offending over the past three decades. I will also highlight major gaps and opportunities to be addressed in research, policy, and practice regarding technology safeguards, primary and secondary prevention of online sexual offending, risk assessment, and intervention.

Bio

Michael Seto, PhD, is a registered clinical and forensic psychologist and research director with The Royal and Professor in Psychiatry at the University of Ottawa. He is also cross-appointed to the University of Toronto, Carleton University, and Ontario Tech University. Dr. Seto has published extensively on pedophilia, sexual offending against children and online sexual offending. He regularly presents at scientific meetings and professional workshops on these topics. He has written well-reviewed books on pedophilia and sexual offending against children (2008, second edition in 2018) and on internet sexual offending (2013, second edition in 2025), all published by the American Psychological Association.

Paul J. Frick

Developmental Pathways to Juvenile Offending: Implications of the DSM-5 and ICD-11 Specifier "with Limited Prosocial Emotions" for Clinical Intervention and Public Policy

Children and adolescents who show persistent antisocial and aggressive behavior represent a serious mental health concern. Their behavior places them at risk for a number of significant educational, social, and legal difficulties throughout the lifespan and their behavior can lead to serious consequences to the victims of their antisocial and aggressive acts. Dr. Frick’s address will summarize research charting the various developmental pathways that can lead youth to show such acts, focusing especially on his research uncovering one such pathway that involves failures in the normal development of empathy, guilt, and other forms of prosocial emotions. Youth in this pathway often show a particularly severe, aggressive, and stable pattern of behavior, which has led to its inclusion in recent diagnostic criteria for Conduct Disorder in both the DSM-5 and ICD-11. The address will discuss implications of this research for identifying children in need of early intervention for their behavior problems and for designing effective interventions for children and adolescents who show antisocial behavior in mental health clinics, schools, and the juvenile justice system.

Bio

Paul J. Frick, Ph.D. is the Roy Crumpler Memorial Chair and Director of Clinical Training for the APA-accredited program in Clinical Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the Louisiana State University. He has published over 300 peer-reviewed publications, over 59 chapters in editor books, and he is the author of 8 additional books and test manuals. A continuing line of research focuses on understanding the different pathways through which youth develop serious antisocial behavior and aggression and the implications of this research for assessment, treatment, and public policy. His work has influenced the criteria used throughout the world for diagnosing children and adolescents with severe behavior problems. His work has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, National Institute of Justice, National Health Medical Research Council of the Australian Government, W.T. Grant Foundation, and the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation. Dr. Frick was the editor of the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology (2007-2011), the official journal of Division 53, and the editor of Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology, the official journal of the International Society for Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology. Dr. Frick was a member of the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5 Workgroup for ADHD and the Disruptive Behavior Disorders (2007-2012) and was the Section Editor (2018-2021) of the Disruptive, Impulse-Control, and Conduct Disorders chapter for the DSM-5-TR.