Varma Penumetcha, MD, FAPA
Board certified in forensic psychiatry, general psychiatry, and addiction medicine.
Medicine and the law ask different questions about the same person. A psychiatric diagnosis does not tell a court whether a defendant can stand trial, or whether an illness keeps someone from working. That is the work I do.
Civil and Disability Evaluations
Disability claims and decision-making capacity turn on psychiatric evidence. I evaluate both. My 2017 article in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law examined how much weight a consultative examination should carry in a disability determination.
Learn more →
Diagnostic Services
When a diagnosis is unsettled, I provide an independent diagnostic evaluation: the same source-based method I apply to forensic work, narrowed to a single question. It is an evaluation, not treatment. Clinicians, institutions, and attorneys retain it directly.
Learn more →
Violence Risk Assessment
How likely is future harm, and to whom? I assess risk to self and others in inpatient and forensic contexts. The work draws on my APA-funded research, "Predicting Violence in Inpatient Mental Health Units of Community Hospitals," and on five years supervising complex psychiatric patients.
Learn more →
Competency Evaluations
Can a defendant understand the proceedings and assist in their own defense? I evaluate that question — competency to stand trial, competency to waive rights, and related capacity questions. Much of my clinical work has been inside the competency-restoration process.
Learn more →
Criminal Responsibility
Criminal responsibility turns on the defendant's mental state at the time of the offense. I evaluate it, including Guilty Except for Insanity. I have worked directly with both insanity and competency-restoration populations, and I supervised a unit through the shift from one to the other.
Learn more →
To ask whether a matter fits my practice, submit a case inquiry →