Campus Threat-Assessment Teams Face Complex Task of Judging Risk

By Beth Mole
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Originally published August 10, 2012

In science-fiction movies like Minority Report,psychics could identify future murderers before they ever picked up a weapon. But the task of predicting the future and thwarting violence by identifying students who are likely to do harm is, in reality, complex, difficult, and full of pitfalls.

Many American colleges set up teams after the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech to monitor campus incidents and, they hope, intervene before a potentially violent member of the community snaps. But those entities - which go by such names as threat-assessment teams, behavioral-intervention teams, or caring teams - face many challenges. Mental-health disorders often develop among young people in the traditional college-age years, but it can be difficult if not impossible to assess the extent of a person's illness early on.

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Many campuses lack ready access to mental-health experts who can authoritatively assess the risk of violence, and some experts say the assessment teams rely too little on those authorities.

At the University of Colorado at Denver, a threat-assessment team reportedly was alerted to a university psychiatrist's concerns about James E. Holmes, a former graduate student there. Mr. Holmes, who withdrew in June from a Ph.D. program in neurosciences at the university's medical campus, in neighboring Aurora, is accused of killing 12 people and injuring 58 others in a movie theater there last month.

News reports have said that the threat-assessment team did not meet to discuss Mr. Holmes because he had announced his intent to withdraw from the university.

The entire story is here.

Thanks to Ken Pope for this information.

Military-Funded Brain Science Sparks Controversy

By Charles Choi

InnovationNewsDaily

Originally published March 20, 2012

Brain research and associated advances such as brain-machine interfaces that are funded by the U.S. military and intelligence communities raise profound ethical concerns, caution researchers who cite the potentially lethal applications of such work and other consequences.

Rapid advances in neuroscience made over the last decade have many dual-use applications of both military and civilian interest. Researchers who receive military funding — with the U.S. Department of Defense spending more than $350 million on neuroscience in 2011 — may not fully realize how dangerous their work might be, say scientists in an essay published online today (March 20) in the open-access journal PLoS Biology.

The entire story is here.

Third-party cases pose liability risks to doctors

By Alicia Gallgos

amdnews.com staff

The Utah Supreme Court is reviewing whether the children of a patient can sue their father's physician for medication mismanagement after the patient shot his wife to death. In a similar case, the Supreme Court of Georgia has ruled that a psychiatrist can be sued for medication negligence after a patient fatally attacked his mother.

The cases raise concerns about doctors' potential liability for criminal actions committed by their patients and what duty, if any, physicians owe to nonpatients. Experts say the cases remind doctors to take note of circumstances that could increase their liability risk to third parties.

In the Georgia case, the father of Victor Bruscato filed a lawsuit on behalf of Victor against psychiatrist Derek O'Brien, MD. He alleged that the doctor's discontinuation of Bruscato's two antipsychotic medications aggravated his son's violent tendencies. After the drugs were stopped, Bruscato, a mentally ill patient with a history of violence, stabbed his mother to death.

Dr. O'Brien had ordered two of Bruscato's medications stopped for six weeks to rule out the possibility that Bruscato was developing neuroleptic malignancy syndrome, according to court documents. A trial court dismissed the case in favor of Dr. O'Brien, ruling that public policy does not allow the Bruscatos to benefit from any wrongdoing, namely the killing of Lillian Bruscato. The appeals court reversed the decision.

In its Sept. 12 opinion, the Supreme Court affirmed, allowing the lawsuit to proceed. Though public policy prevents profiting from a wrongdoing in court, an exception exists if a mentally ill patient isn't aware of what he is doing, the court said. Bruscato was never found guilty of a crime; instead, he was ruled incompetent to stand trial and committed to a state mental hospital.

The rest of the story can be found here.