Maybe the most important job when considering releasing a violent psychiatric patient is deciding whether that patient is going to hurt somebody else once they're out. Unfortunately, according to a paper published in PLoS One, the standard tools used to assess patients' risk of violence aren't particularly good at preventing violence—but may contain clues for how to do just that.
At issue is a set of methods known as Structured Professional Judgment, in particular two very popular methods: theHistorical Clinical Risk Management 20—a 20-question survey that incorporates a patient's history of violence, employment, substance abuse, and other factors to assess the risk of future violence—and a similar method called the Structured Assessment of Protective Factors (SAPROF). In theory, SPJ methods bridge a gap between a psychiatrist's opinion and so-called actuarial approaches, which search for any and all correlations between patient histories and violence, and use those correlations to make individualized predictions about each patient's level of risk.
[For more of this story, written by Nathan Collins, go to http://www.psmag.com/health-an...olence-after-release]
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