Children who threaten violence at school often have psychiatric diagnoses, learning disorders, and educational and treatment needs, report researchers.
The research team investigated child and adolescent psychiatry threat assessment evaluations of 157 school-age youth (mean age: 13.4), referred to the Stony Brook University Child and Adolescent Outpatient Clinic (now called the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Outpatient Clinic at Stony Brook Medicine) by school staff. Evaluations of the children took place at the clinic between 1998 and 2019 and represented 19 school districts encompassing students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds.
“Our work is based on two decades of school threat assessment evaluations performed by myself and colleagues,” says Deborah Weisbrot, lead author and a clinical professor in the psychiatry department at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University. The findings will appear in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.
“Evaluations of youths who make threats need to go beyond simply assessing the threat itself and should include identifying underlying psychiatric problems,” she explains. “And psychiatric evaluations of students who issue threats of any type can lead to revelations about psychiatric diagnoses and crucial treatment and educational recommendations.”
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