Monday, January 28, 2013

Mental-Health Clearance for Guns

On the surface, it sounds good:  psychotics should not be allowed to purchase guns.

That's if you believe that psychiatry and psychology are "science."  But when practitioners tell you that their work results in barely-better-than-dartboard averages....

study of experienced psychiatrists at a major urban psychiatric facility found that they were wrong about which patients would become violent about 30 percent of the time.

....then one doesn't really need to mention the Gulag-ization of "psychotics', right?

Then there's the Law of Unintended Consequences:

...If mental health professionals were required to report severe mental illness (such as paranoid schizophrenia) to state authorities, it would have an immediate chilling effect on the willingness of people to disclose sensitive information, and would discourage many people from seeking treatment....

Conversely, the mental-health professional (who will be owned by ObozoCare, remember?) will be inclined to over-report suspicions, because the penalty for under-reporting will be loss of license.

More at the link.

HT:  Captain's Journal

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Conversely, the mental-health professional (who will be owned by ObozoCare, remember?)

What does this mean? Obamacare is provided by private doctors.

Anonymous said...

Amazing how Dad29 takes a dig at the relevance of psychology/psychiatry, yet is compelled to cite a study that seemingly proves his point. Seemingly, because...

"A study of experienced psychiatrists at a major urban psychiatric facility found that they were wrong about which patients would become violent about 30 percent of the time."

Next time he ought to carefully read the study. It's 30% of INEXPERIENCED psychiatrists.

That means that 70% of veterans were accurate in predicting risk of violence. Furthermore, had Dad29 done his homework, he would have noted that when a risk assessment tool was applied to the cases the junior doctors evaluated, their level of accuracy jumped to 67 percent! This groundbreaking study compares the predictive success of violence assessment between novices and experts. If the trainees are less able than the trained clinicians, then this risk assessment tool has the potential to augment training and improve risk assessment.

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot, or throwing darts blindly...

Anonymous said...

D'OH!!!

Dad29 said...

That means that 70% of veterans were accurate in predicting risk of violence.

Nope. That means that "veterans" missed about 1/3rd of their predictions.

....when they actually made them.

Anonymous said...

No, that means 2/3 of all veteran psychologists made the proper diagnosis. Try again, Dad29.