Concise Guide to Assessment and Management of Violent Patients

By Kenneth Tardiff

Clinicians encounter violent patients in any treatment setting--from private offices and medical units to psychiatric inpatient units. Written by one of the foremost experts on violence, the second edition of this concise, practical guide provides psychiatry residents, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals with vital information required to manage potentially violent patients. Considerably updated, this book contains current information on psychopharmacology and the management of violent patients, an expanded section on the safety of clinicians, and a new section on how to deal with threats of violence to the clinician. This guide will be especially useful and relevant to psychiatric residents, given the number of violent patients they encounter.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 088048344X
• ISBN13: 9780880483445
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: American Psychiatric Association Publishing
• Length: 180 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 4.2" x 6.4"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

The Price of Liberty

Kenneth Tardiff is the acknowledged authority in psychiatry concerning seclusion and restraint, the principle interventions discussed in this work. Nevertheless, the work will need revision now that national standards have been revised to focus more sharply on the safety of mechanical restraint and on the liberty interest the patient has in freedom from excessive restraint. Like many in his profession, Tardiff takes an unfortunately paternalistic view toward the patient's interest in bodily freedom, and also in failing adequately to factor the liberty interest of his patient into the balance of the community's alleged need to be protected from him or her. One hope's his analysis is not also skewed by taking the approach felt less likely to result in litigation against the practitioner - it would be a shame for such an authority to himself marginalize a mentally impaired patient to protect his profession and industry from claims for failing to control the patient at the expense of the public which has sought to isolate him behind the asylum's walls. The work is well written, and with this one caveat recommended. But the patient has rights too, even though as a mental patient he may well have less access to a court to help him enforce them. It is expected that updating the work to take into account new national standards on restraint will resolve the defect, and restore much needed dignity to the otherwise all too vulnerable mental health inpatient.