Psychiatric assessments for predicting violence are ineffective

[HereSince1628]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151112091649.htm

The social relevance of this is that there are increasingly strenuous calls for greater screening to keep guns from people who shouldn't have them. 'People who shouldn't have them' is often a dog-whistle for people with mental disorders

The bottom line is actually in the article's summary: Standard approaches for investigating risk of violence in psychiatric patients and prisoners are inaccurate and should be abandoned in all future studies, according to researchers.

Over 300 risk assessment instruments are currently used by psychiatrists, psychologists, and probation officers to assess the risks of violence and sexual offending among psychiatric patients, prisoners, and the general population. The authors say that producing risk assessment instruments has become an 'industry' and new ones are being produced annually.

QMUL researchers found that none of these instruments have any advantage over those produced before and that their best predictions for future violence are incorrect 30 per cent of the time.

First author Professor Jeremy Coid from QMUL's Wolfson Institute of Preventative Medicine said: "Researchers have become too obsessed with predicting whether a patient will be violent in the future, rather than looking for the causes of why they become violent. While it is helpful to know that a patient has a high or low risk of being violent if you release them from hospital, this is not going to tell you what you should do to stop them being violent.

"It is more important to know which factors are causally related because these are the factors that must be the targets for future treatments and management interventions if the aim is to prevent violence happening in the future."