State board punishes UO counseling center director

By Diane Dietz
The Register-Guard
Originally published July 23, 2016

The state psychology regulatory board voted Friday to punish Shelly Kerr, director of the University of Oregon counseling center, for giving a student’s therapy records to university lawyers without the student’s consent.

Kerr, a senior UO staff psychologist, will receive a letter of reprimand, pay a civil penalty of $2,500 and complete a six-hour course on professional ethics, the Board of Psychologist Examiners ruled.

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“Here, given the lack of a signed release from the student and the inherent conflict between the university’s interest and (the psychologist’s) ethical obligations to protect privacy of (counseling center) clients, (Kerr) should have taken additional precautions to protect the student’s counseling records.

The article is here.

Under Gun Rules, FBI Will Receive Health Data

By Robert Pear
The New York Times
Originally posted January 6, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Virtually every push for new gun sale restrictions in recent years has been greeted by opponents countering with proposals to address mental health as a factor in gun violence.

“For those in Congress who so often rush to blame mental illness for mass shootings as a way of avoiding action on guns, here’s your chance to support these efforts,” Mr. Obama said at the White House on Tuesday.

But that challenge moved the administration into a thicket of difficult health questions. Under a rule published Wednesday in the Federal Register, the background check system run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation will receive the names of people who are forbidden to buy or own firearms because they have been involuntarily committed to a mental institution or found to pose a danger to themselves or others.

The article is here.

Pa. sends mental health data for gun checks

By Moriah Balingit / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Originally published January 19, 2013

After facing legal and technical challenges for more than two years, the Pennsylvania State Police this week began transmitting hundreds of thousands of mental health records to a federal database used to conduct background checks for potential gun buyers.

On Tuesday, 643,167 mental health records were sent to the FBI-run National Instant Check System (NICS), according to the state police. The records represent people who are prohibited from buying guns because of involuntary mental health commitments.

"It's been an objective of ours for close to two years, so I think it's an important accomplishment that these records were able to be uploaded to NICS," said Lt. Col. Scott Snyder, deputy commissioner for the state police. The state police are working to fix a program that will upload the records automatically as they're created.

Strengthening the national database and universal background checks have been pillars of President Barack Obama's gun control agenda. On Wednesday, when he unfurled a massive gun control package, some executive orders were intended to make it easier for states to transmit mental health records to NICS.

Despite the state's achieving that goal, a disagreement between the state police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives over interpretation of federal gun law throws into question how the records will be used. At issue is the 302, the shortest and most common type of involuntary mental health commitment.

On Friday, a spokeswoman for the ATF said the bureau was still reviewing whether a 302 should preclude someone under federal law from buying a gun.

The entire story is here.

'Protecting' Psychiatric Medical Records Puts Patients At Risk Of Hospitalization

Medical News Today
Originally published January 6, 2013

Medical centers that elect to keep psychiatric files private and separate from the rest of a person's medical record may be doing their patients a disservice, a Johns Hopkins study concludes.

In a survey of psychiatry departments at 18 of the top American hospitals as ranked by U.S. News & World Report's Best Hospitals in 2007, a Johns Hopkins team learned that fewer than half of the hospitals had all inpatient psychiatric records in their electronic medical record systems and that fewer than 25 percent gave non-psychiatrists full access to those records.

Strikingly, the researchers say, psychiatric patients were 40 percent less likely to be readmitted to the hospital within the first month after discharge in institutions that provided full access to those medical records.

"The big elephant in the room is the stigma," says Adam I. Kaplin, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and leader of the study published online in the International Journal of Medical Informatics. "But there are unintended consequences of trying to protect the medical records of psychiatric patients. When you protect psychiatric patients in this way, you're protecting them from getting better care. We're not helping anyone by not treating these diseases as we would other types of maladies. In fact, we're hurting our patients by not giving their medical doctors the full picture of their health."

The entire story is here.