PSY344H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Substance Abuse, Mental Disorder, Paraphilia
Document Summary
3 different methods of risk assessment for violence. Lecture 7: risk assessment: unstructured clinical judgment. This process involves a review of the info about a person the clinician uses knowledge, experience and intuition to make a judgment about future risk. Psychiatric symptoms and diagnoses are important as they are the best indicators of risk, and clinical skills are required to assess them. However, there is high amount of professional discretion and lack of guidelines in this procedure. There are no rules regarding what sources of information should be used or which factors should be used, thus risk factors vary across clinicians and cases. This assessment relies on an informal and subjective conclusion: actuarial predictions. Use of statistical procedure: the risk factors used are selected and combined based on their statistical or empirical association with an outcome. In other words, studies have been to demonstrate that a combination of these risk factors predict violence.
