A lower court in California dismissed the suit on the basis of immunity for the multiple defendants and the psychologist’s need to preserve confidentiality, which at the time was the widely held standard.
Mental health professionals duty to inform plus#
Tarasoff’s parents sued the university’s Board of Regents, several employees of the student health service, and the university police chief plus four of his officers because the Tarasoffs’ daughter was never notified of Poddar’s threat. No one warned Tarasoff or her family of Poddar’s threat, and he never returned to treatment. Poddar informed his psychologist that he was planning to kill an unnamed woman (easily identified as Tatiana Tarasoff) on her return to the university from her summer vacation. The Tarasoff case involved Prosenjit Poddar, who was receiving outpatient mental health counseling at Cowell Memorial Hospital at the University of California at Berkeley. Regents of the University of California, which established the national benchmark for mental health professionals’ disclosure of confidential information to protect third parties from harm. Although the Volk case concerned a psychiatrist, its ruling reasonably applies to other types of mental health clinicians, including social workers.įor more than four decades, social workers have been taught about the ethical implications of the famed case Tarasoff v. The decision greatly expanded the professional’s traditional duty to take reasonable steps to protect identified third parties who might be harmed by clients. This landmark case reached the Washington Supreme Court, which, in 2016, affirmed the appellate court’s decision and ruled that a psychiatrist could be liable for homicides even though the victims were not identified as targets of violence.įor social workers and other mental health professionals in Washington State, the Supreme Court’s decision was both astonishing and deeply troubling. The plaintiffs appealed, and the appellate court overturned the lower court’s decision.
Mental health professionals duty to inform trial#
At the trial court level, the case was dismissed in Ashby’s favor.
Schiering’s mother and her surviving children sued Ashby and the clinic where he worked for medical negligence, alleging their failure to assess DeMeerleer’s homicidal risk and provide proper treatment. According to records, over the years DeMeerleer had shared suicidal and homicidal thoughts with Ashby but had not threatened his victims. DeMeerleer had a long history of living with depression and bipolar disorder for a number of years he had received treatment from psychiatrist Howard Ashby, MD, in Spokane, WA. On July 18, 2010, Jan DeMeerleer entered the home of his former girlfriend, Rebecca Schiering, and killed her and one of her sons. Eye on Ethics: Social Workers’ Duty to Protect and Warn - Evolving Standards
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