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Full-Text Articles in Law
Critique Of Pure Risk Assessment Or, Kant Meets Tarasoff, Douglas Mossman Md
Critique Of Pure Risk Assessment Or, Kant Meets Tarasoff, Douglas Mossman Md
Faculty Articles and Other Publications
This Article takes a "critical" approach to the assumptions underlying current practices of violence risk assessment. The Article first explicates a fundamental difference between how mental health researchers now interpret the phrase "violence prediction" and how they understood that phrase in the 1970s. Applying a "critical" approach, the Article then shows that courts and mental health professionals may need to abandon the hope that more accurate methods of predicting violence will help clinicians make better decisions about potential violence. Although this result may seem disappointing, it can liberate mental health professionals from regarding patients as statistical sources of risk and …
Dangerous Decisions: An Essay On The Mathematics Of Clinical Violence Prediction And Involuntary Hospitalization, Douglas Mossman Md
Dangerous Decisions: An Essay On The Mathematics Of Clinical Violence Prediction And Involuntary Hospitalization, Douglas Mossman Md
Faculty Articles and Other Publications
This Article has two major purposes. First, it provides a mathematical
description of an ideal procedure for making clinical decisions about patients'
future violence, a description that provides a context for evaluating clinicians'
"dangerousness decisions." For purposes of illustration, the Article uses a specific clinical situation-deciding whether to hospitaize involuntarily a patient
based on his risk of harming another. The Article argues that the decision
involves balancing potential risks to third parties (often the patient's family
members) with the "massive deprivation of liberty and other potential
harms to the patient that could result from confinement. The mathematical
description of the …