Marvin Swartz

Dr. Marvin Swartz serves as the lead of our Behavioral Health Research Team. His major research interests are in examining the effectiveness of services for severely mentally ill individuals, including legal factors that improve or impede good outcomes. His current research includes: the effectiveness of involuntary outpatient commitment, psychiatric advance directives, criminal justice outcomes for persons with mental illnesses, violence and mental illness and antipsychotic medications.

Marvin also served as a member of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Mandated Community Treatment. In this and related work he examined the role legal tools such as Psychiatric Advance Directives may play in improving outcomes for persons with severe mental illness. In this regard, he served as Co-PI with Jeffrey Swanson of a NIMH study examining the effectiveness of Psychiatric Advance Directives and a MacArthur Foundation grant supporting their dissemination. They also evaluated New York’s Assisted Outpatient Treatment Program (Kendra’s Law) and estimated the cost of criminal justice involvement in severely mentally ill individuals. His current work includes NC-funded studies of the adequacy of substance use disorder services for persons re-entering from NC prisons, including justice-involved youth and the status of involuntary inpatient and outpatient commitment programs in NC with options for reform.

You can learn more about Marvin on his Duke Scholars page.