(DOWNLOAD) "Texas Court of Appeals Holds That a Hospital had No Duty to Protect from Harm Three Individuals, Including an Ex-Wife, Who a Depressed, Paranoid, And Suicidal Patient Murdered After Leaving the Hospital" by Developments in Mental Health Law # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Texas Court of Appeals Holds That a Hospital had No Duty to Protect from Harm Three Individuals, Including an Ex-Wife, Who a Depressed, Paranoid, And Suicidal Patient Murdered After Leaving the Hospital
- Author : Developments in Mental Health Law
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Law,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 89 KB
Description
The California Supreme Court in 1976 ruled that mental health providers in California must take reasonable steps when they know or should know that their client presents a serious danger of violence to an identified or readily identifiable third party. Tarasoff v. Regents of the Univ. of Cal., 551 P.2d 334 (Cal. 1976). Most states currently impose similar duties on their mental health professionals. Anthony Parsio, The Psychotherapist-Patient Privilege: The Perils of Recognizing a "Dangerous Patient" Exception in Criminal Trials, 41 NEW ENG. L. REV. 623, 642 (2007). The Supreme Courts of both Texas and Virginia rejected this so-called Tarasoff doctrine. The Virginia Supreme Court held that neither the doctor-patient relationship nor the hospital-patient relationship, standing alone, qualified as a "special relationship" that would trump the general rule that there is no duty to control the conduct of someone to prevent harm to a third party and thereby trigger a duty to warn non-patients of a patient's threats to harm them. Nasser v. Parker, 455 S.E.2d 502 (Va. 1995). The court noted that a special relationship that would require a warning could exist if a doctor or a hospital was vested with a higher degree of control over the patient than exists in an ordinary doctor-patient or hospital-patient relationship, but this requisite degree of control was not established merely by accepting and admitting a patient for the purpose of providing continuing and prolonged mental health treatment.