What responsibility does an institution have to the wider community when it has identified a deeply disturbed individual?

Sally Satel, M.D., writes that in the wake of the Arizona shooting, now is the time to mandate the reporting of mental health concerns to help prevent future tragic incidents.

On October 31, 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed into law the Community Mental Health Centers Act, through which psychiatric patients would be treated in small community clinics rather than in large expensive state hospitals. Though the act promised to improve conditions and save millions of dollars, it mostly added...

Panelists judged the effectiveness of the Community Mental Health Centers Act on October 31, 2003.

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Since the 1960s in the United States, hundreds of thousands of patients with severe psychiatric disorders were discharged from public mental hospitals. At the same time, activists forced changes in commitment laws that made it impossible to treat...