Mental Health Reporting Legislation

Mental Health Reporting Legislation
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Mental Health Reporting Legislation
The SAFE Act amends the Mental Hygiene Law by adding a new clause that compels medical professionals to disclose if they decide, using appropriate professional judgment, that a patient is likely to engage in activities that might result in substantial damage to self or others. The name and other non-clinical identifying information of the subject must be disclosed to the regional directors of community services, who will subsequently transmit it to the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) (Filindra, 2020). DCJS will use this information to determine whether an existing weapons license should be suspended or revoked, as well as if a person will be unable to get one. In this scenario, law enforcement officers can forcibly remove licensed weapons or guns from a person's possession. A separate component of the SAFE Act mandates that all involuntary patients committed to an inpatient facility be reported to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS-100) through a state portal.
Both before and after the Act's passage, proponents and opponents of the mental health reporting provisions took a variety of perspectives. The SAFE Act requires reporting a mental health professional's generic worry about dangerousness rather than a specific threat, immediate harm, or an identified victim. Furthermore, the normal Tarasoff legislation only compels the patient to declare a danger to a potential victim or the police, which does not automatically prohibit the patient's access to firearms. Previously, firearms restrictions were only imposed if a severe mental disorder diagnosis resulted in a sentence or conviction. Tarasoff disclosure regulations only apply to known victims who were the target of explicit threats (Jacobs & Fuhr, 2017). On the other hand, the SAFE Act has adopted a novel approach, forcing mental health specialists to divulge broad concerns about the potential threat and linking such findings to restrictions that eventually allow the state to confiscate lawfully held guns.
The validity of the SAFE Act has been called into doubt, and others believe it is a bad policy. Mental health professionals and advocacy groups for the mentally ill contend that mental illness has only a minimal role in gun violence. They believe that the SAFE Act's reporting requirements impair the patient-therapist relationship, discourage those who need therapy from seeking it, and wrongly focus the gun-control debate on mental-health concerns (Liberatos et al., 2019). Even those who are opposed to gun regulation in general support limitations on gun ownership by people suffering from mental diseases, which are commonly blamed for these terrible instances.
Furthermore, it may hurt people's willingness to seek or maintain mental health therapy. One of the most important guiding principles of medicine is the responsibility of secrecy between a doctor and a patient, which is even more critical in treating mental illness. Psychotherapy is unique among medical specialties in that patients' revelation of inner ideas and feelings is frequently required for mental disease treatment (Lib...