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Lawmakers

New York State’s New Gun Law Shreds Patient Confidentiality, Trust

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 6/19/2024

New York State's New Gun Law Shreds Patient Confidentiality, Trust On Tuesday, New York became the first state to pass a tough new law on gun ownership. But not the kind of gun ownership that is actually responsible for most of the murders in the U.S. No, just one targeted at making tragedies like Newtown, CT a little more difficult in the future to pull off.

But in focusing on these one-off tragedies that subjectively seem epic (but objectively, are a drop in our national murder-rate bucket), the over-reaction of the lawmakers was predictable.

So lawmakers have decided to turn every physician, nurse, social worker, therapist and mental health professional in New York into a new kind of mandated reporter — people who turn into police officers when it comes to certain behaviors. In doing so, lawmakers in New York have single-handedly shred the foundation of confidentiality and trust in the doctor/patient and therapist/client relationship.

Is this a sensible reaction?

6/19/2024 16 comments

When Violence Strikes on a Psychiatric Ward

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 5/25/2023

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

Milwaukee County’s Mental Health Complex features a short-term inpatient psychiatric facility that seeks to help those with serious mental health issues — including survivors of trauma and sexual abuse — get better. Patients stay an average of 11.5 days while at the facility and more than 90 percent of them are discharged back to their own care or home.

By far, most people who are admitted to the facility carry a diagnosis within the “psychoses” category of diagnoses — which usually means schizophrenia or a related disorder. Over one-third of their patients are under 19 years old — teens and children. About half the patients they treat are men, the other half women.

More than half the people who seek out treatment at a facility like this will have their tab picked up by taxpayers like you and I, because their bill will be paid by Medicare or Medicaid.

The Complex sports four inpatient wards. But the Complex has a bit of a problem. Instead of segregating men from women on the wards — which is common practice in many other inpatient psychiatric facilities — Milwaukee County has co-ed wards. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem. If this were a college. But it’s not a college, it’s an acute inpatient treatment facility.

So when violence strikes the wards, what do they do?

5/25/2023 29 comments

Violence and Mental Illness: Victims, Not Perpetrators

by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. 5/25/2022

By John M. Grohol, Psy.D.

Violence and Mental Illness: Victims, Not Perpetrators As lawmakers across the country continue to pass ill-conceived laws implicating people with mental illness as having a greater penchant for violence (despite the scientific evidence that says otherwise), a new study has come out showing what most mental health advocates have long known. People with mental illness are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it.

The study — published in the BMJ and conducted on data derived from the entire population of Sweden (can we say, “Big study!”) — found “After adjustment for sociodemographic confounders, any mental disorder was associated with a 4.9-fold risk of homicidal death, relative to people without mental disorders.”

In plain English — people with mental illness in Sweden were at nearly 5 times the risk of being murdered than citizens without a mental illness diagnosis.

Rather than wasting time passing laws to try and minimize outlier, tragic events (which, by their very definition, cannot be minimized by the passage of new laws), we instead should be putting more resources into protecting and helping treat people with mental illness.

5/25/2022 3 comments