Ethical Issues: A Duty To Warn Case Study

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Recommended: Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California

Ethical Issues: A Duty to Warn Imagine living in a state where one is providing service to a client and the client divulged that he admits to wanting to end his ex-girlfriends life but one lives in a state where there is no duty to warn. What does one do in a situation like this? This question comes about due to the Tarasoff v. The University of California Board of Regents case as well as the fact that there is no uniformity in the United States over duty to warn or protect. Some states have permissive statutes while some have an established mandatory duty to warn while very few have no statute at all. According to Doverspike (2007), the APA standard is permissive ("may disclose") rather than mandatory ("shall disclose"). The APA Code of Ethics 4.05 part 3 states that disclosures without consent are is only allowed when mandated by law to protect the client, psychologist, or others from harm (Fisher, 2013, p. 346). How does one protect the confidentiality of a client but also protect others from potential harm? The Tarasoff v. The …show more content…

According to the Bradley Center v. Wessner, Georgia statutory law does not address the so-called duty to warn, Georgia does have a legal precedent as defined by case law that establishes a duty to protect identifiable third parties (Doverspike, 2007). The practitioners basically got in trouble because they had a patient in inpatient who the physician failed to exercise control over and the patient ended up hurting someone he made a threat against. Another case represents the undefined duty to warn. Garner v. Stone (1999) a six person jury in a DeKalb County, Georgia, state court found in favor of a former police officer with Gwinnett County, Georgia, who sued a psychologist for violating the physician-patient privilege after the psychologist made a warning call to an identifiable third party (As cited in Doverspike,

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