This story comes from our partner聽鈥榮 Shots blog.
States aren鈥檛 likely to prevent many shootings by requiring mental health professionals to report potentially violent patients, psychiatrists and psychologists say.
鈥淲e鈥檙e not likely to catch very many potentially violent people鈥� with laws like the one in New York, says聽, a professor of psychology at Fordham University in The Bronx.
The New York law says mental health professionals must report people they consider likely to do harm. It also gives law enforcement officials the power to take guns from these people.
Such laws 鈥渃ast a very large net that will probably restrict a lot of people鈥檚 behavior unnecessarily,鈥� Rosenfeld says. 鈥淢aybe we鈥檒l prevent an incident or two,鈥� he says. 鈥淏ut there are other ways that would be more productive.鈥�
Better alternatives include reducing the total number of guns and improving access to mental health care, Rosenfeld says.
One of the biggest problems with laws like the one in New York is that it asks all mental health professionals to make assessments that are difficult for even those with years of special training, says Rosenfeld.
Rosenfeld says when he is called in to assess a person鈥檚 risk of violence, 鈥淚 typically have the benefit of a lengthy face-to-face interview, records on their criminal and mental health history, a tremendous amount of information at my disposal that the typical mental health professional on the fly simply doesn鈥檛 have.鈥�
And even highly trained professionals with lots of information often get it wrong, research shows.
础听聽at a major urban psychiatric facility found that they were wrong about which patients would become violent about 30 percent of the time.
That鈥檚 a much higher error rate than with most medical tests, says聽, a psychiatrist at the University of Michigan and an author of the study.
One reason even experienced psychiatrists are often wrong is that there are only a few clear signs that a person with a mental illness is likely to act violently, says聽, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. These include a history of violence and a current threat to commit violence.
Without either of these, Hoge says, 鈥渁n accurate assessment of the likelihood of future violence is virtually impossible.鈥�
鈥淭he biggest risk for gun violence is possession of a gun,鈥� says Hoge. 鈥淎nd there鈥檚 no evidence that the mentally ill possess guns or commit gun violence at any greater rate than the normal population.鈥�