Imagine being a therapist and one of your patients, suffering from delusions and paranoia, tells you he’d had a bad week, that he’d considered buying a gun and ending his life and maybe “taking out a bunch of people” with him.
For one therapist I talked to last week, it’s not a hypothetical — that very thing happened to him recently. What’s more, there wasn’t anything he could do to stop it.
“It’s the kind of situation that would not meet the standard of imminence to hospitalize someone against their will,” said this therapist, who I’m not naming because he was discussing patient issues.