Kevin Rector reports:
Sitting around a broad table in a nondescript office in Reisterstown (Maryland) last week, more than a dozen mental health advocates, medical professionals and law enforcement officials stared tensely at one another.
Nearly a month after the state-created task force issued a report outlining its findings on psychiatric patients’ access to firearms, several members were questioning a key recommendation — that mental health professionals should be required to report to law enforcement all patients who threaten suicide.
“Some people say they would be reporting every single person who walked through their door,” said Dan Martin, a panel member representing the Mental Health Association of Maryland.
Laura Cain, of the Maryland Disability Law Center, insisted that reporting of suicidal threats hadn’t been fully considered, “because we would have objected to that.”
[…]
The Maryland General Assembly is considering legislation, based on the task force’s work, to require mental health professionals to report patients who make verbal or physical threats of suicide or serious violence. Law enforcement would use the information to investigate and potentially seize any guns the patients own.
New York recently approved legislation implementing a similar requirement.
Dr. Paul Appelbaum, past president of the American Psychiatric Association, said such efforts strip away the discretion of psychiatrists and other mental health professionals to decide the best course of action after hearing a troubling statement from a patient.
“What’s really different about this new-wave approach is that it turns a clinical issue into a legal issue, and it takes discretion out of the hands of the clinician by requiring a mandatory breach of the privacy of the medical and mental health setting,” said Appelbaum, director of the division of law, ethics and psychiatry at Columbia University.
Read more on The Baltimore Sun.
Requiring us to report any and all patients who make any verbal threats of suicide or violence is an abomination as we’d be over-reporting and probably harming the therapeutic relationship without any foreseeable gain in public safety. On some level, this is very much like the “security theater” we saw with TSA in the wake of 9/11 – lots of ridiculous new rules of no discernible benefit in keeping the public safe.