Psychological Services 2015, Vol. 12, No. 1, 16 –19
© 2014 American Psychological Association 1541-1559/15/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0037202
BRIEF REPORT
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
A Model of Service and Training: Threat Assessment on a Community College Campus David F. Mrad and Antoni J. S. Hanigan
Joyce R. Bateman
Forest Institute
Ozarks Technical Community College
Forensic psychological assessment for targeted violence is a growing area of practice and community need. These threat assessments are particularly challenging on community college campuses given the broad range of students and the limited internal resources. A collaborative model of partnership between a community college and the training clinic of a doctoral program in clinical psychology has been developed and implemented. The model provides needed service to the community college and rich training experiences for doctoral students in psychology. Implementation of similar partnerships in other settings may be limited by the training and experience of doctoral faculty and the openness of behavioral intervention teams to external participants. Keywords: threat assessment, campus violence, consultation
static risk factors. There is typically a sense of urgency. That is, threat assessments occur in real time, with dynamic risk factors constantly changing and often necessitating an immediate reassessment and potential response. Risk assessments, however, typically occur in institutional settings where the evaluator can take time to gather necessary information or obtain additional observation. The results then are often submitted for court proceedings which might occur with some delay. Depending on the specific population to which the subject of interest belongs, the base rates for violence in risk assessments may be low to moderately high (Conroy & Murrie, 2007), but the violence being predicted is often reactive or affective (Meloy, 2006). Threat assessment, on the other hand, is dealing specifically with predatory or intended violence, often mass casualty events, such as school shootings, which have a very low base rate (Meloy, Hart, & Hoffmann, 2014). Given these low base rates, and the urgency involved, Meloy et al. (2014) point out that threat assessments have to rely on an idiographic approach with inductive reasoning. Finally, as is sometimes the case with risk assessment also, the emphasis in threat assessment is on managing, that is, preventing or minimizing, rather than simply predicting violence. Such management often requires flexible and creative strategies (Mohandie, 2013). Unlike risk assessment, where management of risk usually focuses exclusively on the potentially violent subject of concern, threat assessment often entails focusing on protection of potential targets (Meloy et al., 2014). The challenge of assessing threats (trying to distinguish the true positives from the false positives of a very low base rate phenomenon) experienced on all campuses, is made all the more difficult in community college settings because of the open enrollment policies and resulting variability among students (Meloy, 2013). Additionally, unlike many universities, community colleges do not have graduate departments of psychology or medical school de-
The attacks at Columbine High School in 1999, Virginia Tech University in 2007, and Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, have demonstrated that mass murder can occur on any level of academic campuses. Nevertheless, institutions of higher learning remain particularly vulnerable given the open access and freedom of most campuses. As a result, many institutions of higher learning have developed teams to assess and manage risks (Pollard, Nolan & Deisinger, 2012). Organizations such as the National Behavioral Intervention Team Association (NaBITA) and the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals (ATAP) have also grown in response to the need for campuses and workplaces to increase their physical safety by receiving training, sharing ideas, and promoting research concerning threat assessment and management. Although there have been many advances in the research and practice of violence risk assessment in general in the past two decades (Heilbrun, 2009; Monahan, 2013), those advances are of limited utility in the more complex and challenging area of threat assessment. Meloy, Hart, and Hoffmann (2014) identify several significant distinctions between risk assessment and threat assessment. Threat assessments, unlike risk assessments, usually occur in an operational context with an emphasis on dynamic rather than
This article was published Online First July 7, 2014. David F. Mrad and Antoni J. S. Hanigan, School of Professional Psychology at Forest Institute; Joyce R. Bateman, Counseling Services, Ozarks Technical Community College. The authors wish to disclose their employment at Forest Institute and Ozarks Technical Community College, which are reviewed positively in this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to David F. Mrad, School of Professional Psychology at Forest Institute, Springfield, MO 65807. E-mail: [email protected] 16
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
A MODEL OF SERVICE AND TRAINING
partments of psychiatry which might offer expertise in risk or threat assessment. As reported in the American College Counseling Association’s Community College Task Force (CCTF) Survey of Community/2-year College Counseling Services (2013), there is a national trend toward an increase in numbers of students attending college with severe mental health issues (Gallagher, 2012). The Gallagher (2012) and CCTF surveys also report an increasing necessity for counseling staff to provide a greater array of counseling services (e.g., substance abuse prevention services, domestic violence prevention programming, academic advising, career counseling), while still providing appropriate treatment for greater numbers of students, including those with severe mental health issues. The large majority of community college counseling centers across the nation have a very limited number of staff and yet still find a way to provide these comprehensive services, including working with more students with severe psychological disturbance. In some instances across the nation, however, the community college budget has not been able to support the demand for comprehensive counseling services and in these cases, mental health counseling services have been out-sourced.
The Behavioral Intervention Team In response to their challenge, Ozarks Technical Community College (OTC) initiated a creative partnership with the Robert J. Murney training clinic of the School of Professional Psychology at Forest Institute. OTC was established in 1990 and after years of unprecedented growth, is now the third largest community college in Missouri, serving a 12-county area of south central and southwest Missouri with three campuses and two additional education centers. Seventy percent of OTC’s 15,000 credit students qualify for financial aid, 1,300 students report they are first-generation college students, and the average student age is 25. OTC first began offering mental health counseling services in 1997. Its small-staff counseling center (two full-time and two part-time, Master’s level counselors) serves approximately 5% of OTC’s student population annually for individual, mental health counseling services and reaches approximately 20%–30% of the campus population in the wide variety of mental health outreach programs that they sponsor each year. Although counseling services have not been out-sourced at OTC, the counseling staff can attest to these national trends and have therefore found it imperative to identify supports in the community to strengthen the services they can offer students. These supports include the development of the collaborative OTCCares initiative and a model of partnership with the training clinic of a local, professional school of psychology. OTCCares is a set of resources that was established to protect the health and safety of the campus community at OTC. OTCCares brings together resources from Disability Support Services, Safety & Security, Counseling Services, the Dean of Students office, and the Behavioral Intervention Team (BIT) in an effort to reach more students before crises occur. All resources of OTCCares are critical to the success of the initiative; however, it is the BIT that coordinates services for the OTCCares initiative and is the primary focus of this discussion. The BIT employs a formalized approach to addressing mental health issues and other behaviors that either pose a danger of harm to self or others or disrupt the learning environment. The goals of the BIT are: (a) to prevent crises before
17
they occur through the provision of outreach and educational programming, consultation, appropriate assessment and referrals; (b) to ensure that students whose behavior is of concern are contacted through follow-up processes and have access to the appropriate services needed to improve their welfare; and (c) to create a unified and accessible reporting and tracking system that will allow members of the BIT to observe patterns of behavior that may necessitate further assessment and to provide documented responses to distressed students. The BIT initiative has aided in creating an institutional culture of recognizing, responding, reporting, and referring students of concern so that intervention is provided quickly, effectively, and to a broader number of students. After a year of development and training, 2010 marked the formal introduction of the BIT initiative to the OTC community. Six, full-time OTC employees comprise the BIT, including the Director of Counseling, Dean of Students, Assistant Dean of Disability Support Services, Assistant Registrar, College Director of Safety and Security, and a full-time faculty member. All members of the BIT are masters or doctoral level professionals, with extensive experience working in higher education student affairs, administration, and instruction. Members have a combined background in disability support, vocational rehabilitation, law enforcement, military service, student conduct, and two are Licensed Professional Counselors. Since its inception, over 1,600 individual incident reports, (roughly 40 per month) have been submitted through the BIT’s secure, online reporting system. The BIT has become a significant and integral component of OTC’s overall campus safety plan. During their 2 to 3-hr, weekly meetings, members of the BIT review new incident reports, assign appropriate action plans, and provide updates and progress reports on open cases. In addition, team members plan educational outreach activities and professional development events for the campus community in order to further the mission and message of OTCCares and the BIT. In addition to weekly meetings, BIT members regularly consult (often on a daily basis) to ensure collaborative and purposeful interventions with students who have been reported through the BIT. The BIT provides regular, year-round, professional development opportunities to ensure that members of the OTC community understand the kinds of behaviors to report, how to report, and why reporting is essential. In addition to in-person trainings, the OTCCares Web pages (www.otc.edu/otccares) provide resources, FAQs, and detailed instruction on the reporting process. OTC utilizes an online reporting system that has proven to be a secure, easily accessible resource that allows all members of the OTC community (employees, students, and visitors) to report behaviors of concern with confidence and, if preferred, with anonymity. The members of OTC’s BIT possess a wide variety of educational and professional experience. Even with the use of wellrespected behavioral intervention and risk assessment tools, backgrounds in higher education and law enforcement and years of experience in helping students of concern, they recognized that additional resources and expertise were critical in order to provide the most comprehensive and appropriate interventions. Over a decade ago, OTC began a successful partnership with the Robert J. Murney Clinic, the training clinic of the School of Professional Psychology at Forest Institute, in order to provide OTC students an affordable option in securing learning and psychological assessments. Students of concern who required such
MRAD, HANIGAN, AND BATEMAN
18
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
assessments could be easily referred by OTC’s Disability Support or Counseling Services staff to obtain necessary services at the Murney Clinic. The partnership was beneficial both for OTC students and the psychology trainees (clinical psychology practicum students and predoctoral interns) at the Murney Clinic. OTC students received psychological and learning evaluations for a reduced fee and the clinical psychology graduate students assessing them gained valuable, hands-on experience. In 2011, OTC entered into an expanded, contractual relationship with the Murney Clinic of Forest Institute in order to make available additional support for the BIT and expedited threat assessments of students of concern.
The Doctoral Program As a training clinic for clinical psychology doctoral students, the Murney Clinic is a major provider of low-cost, mental health services to the underserved population of southwest Missouri. The academic faculty and practicum supervisors at Forest, where forensic psychology is one of the concentration areas, include members with expertise in forensic psychological assessment. There are three board certified forensic psychologists on faculty. One of them serves as the consultant to OTC. In that role, he is available to the BIT to provide professional development opportunities and for phone or in-person consultation and, along with a doctoral student, attends BIT meetings once a month. Most importantly, he and the student are available to provide threat assessment and comprehensive psychological evaluation services quickly when emergency situations arise. Although a large majority of reports received through the BIT process involve low-level distress, there are occasions when reported student behaviors are severe and appear threatening. When these types of urgent reports are received, responding immediately and with thorough psychological evaluation as part of the threat assessment is critical. The contractual relationship with OTC provides for this immediate response. That response is further enhanced by the monthly participation in the BIT meetings, because the meetings foster an understanding of the OTC culture and the BIT mission and resources, and also a working knowledge of many of the students with whom they work. Like other community colleges, the broad range of programs, admission policies, and affordability of OTC result in a more varied and diverse campus community than typical university campuses. For instance, even without 4-year degrees or graduate programs, the average age of the students is 25 with 6% of them being military veterans. Of those students referred to the BIT, the average age is 28. During the 2-year relationship between OTC and Forest, four students were referred for urgent evaluations. Those evaluations were typically initiated within 2 days of the referral. All four referrals were male students. In only one instance did a verbal threat precipitate the referral. In the other three cases, the referral was in response to various disturbing and escalating behaviors by the students. Only one of the students was traditional college age. The other three students were all older than traditional undergraduates and were veterans. Two of the veterans were experiencing extreme financial stressors, which were at risk of being exacerbated if they were withdrawn from the school and lost their financial aid. This potential highlights one of the complexities of threat assessment in an academic or employment setting. Withdrawal of a student or termination of an employee can be an added
stressor which elevates the risk of violence and reduces the opportunities for intervention or monitoring of the student. In all four cases, the forensic evaluator offered opinions that the students did not present a high risk for imminent violence. The evaluator also recommended follow-up intervention strategies to monitor and manage the risk presented by the students of concern. The partnership between a behavioral intervention team and a training clinic is not only mutually beneficial for the parties involved, but provides additional training and career opportunities for clinical psychology doctoral students. The first doctoral student involved in the evaluations was particularly interested in violence risk and threat assessment. She had taken forensic elective courses in her training at the School of Professional Psychology, including a course on violence risk assessment, which helped prepare her for the practicum experience. Although typical practicum placements allow for real world training in a variety of settings, this particular arrangement provided research inspiration, global networking, and specialized training, as well as the opportunity to discuss threat assessment with many key figures in the field at national conferences of NaBITA and ATAP. In fact, her involvement with the program lead to an opportunity to focus her doctoral research project on assessing the psychometric qualities of a new risk assessment instrument developed by one of those national leaders. In sum, the opportunity helped train her in additional skills she can use to provide similar services in other areas at the end of her training and provided an excellent opportunity for research with a new risk assessment instrument.
Conclusion Although the benefits of the relationship between Ozarks Technical Community College and the School of Professional Psychology at Forest Institute may be unique in that they have accrued not only to both institutions but also specifically to one individual doctoral student, the partnership could serve as a model for similar arrangements. Most clinical psychology doctoral programs have some type of training clinic that provides community service. Many are located in communities where local community colleges or even universities may have a need for psychological consultation and occasionally psychological assessments which need to be rapidly scheduled. Similar arrangements could provide a valuable resource to the community college and a valuable training opportunity to the doctoral program. Of course, the opportunity for similar partnerships to be beneficial would be dependent on the kind of academic training available within the doctoral program, the expertise of the faculty in risk or threat assessment, the capability of the program to provide the faculty supervisor with the time required for this activity, and the openness of the behavioral intervention or threat assessment teams to include external consultants. In the places where those factors exist, and they may be many, comparable arrangements could provide expert assistance in threat management to community college campuses, service opportunities to forensic faculty members, and training opportunities to interested graduate students.
References Community College Task Force. (2013). CCTF Survey 2012–2013. Alexandria, VA: American College Counseling Association.
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
A MODEL OF SERVICE AND TRAINING Conroy, M. A., & Murrie, D. C. (2007). Forensic assessment of violence risk: A guide for risk assessment and risk management. New York, NY: Wiley. doi:10.1002/9781118269671 Gallagher, R. P. (2012). National survey of counseling center directors. Alexandria, VA: International Association of Counseling Services. Heilbrun, K. (2009). Evaluation for risk of violence in adults. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Meloy, J. R. (2006). The empirical basis and forensic application of affective and predatory violence. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 40, 539 –547. doi:10.1080/j.1440-1614.2006.01837.x Meloy, J. R. (2013, September). Advanced threat assessment and threat management. Workshop presented for Specialized Training Services, Portland, OR. Meloy, J. R., Hart, S., & Hoffmann, J. (2014). Threat assessment and threat management. In J. R. Meloy & J. Hoffmann (Eds.), International handbook of threat assessment (pp. 3–17). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
19
Mohandie, K. (2013, September). Campus and school violence threat management. Workshop presented for Specialized Training Services, Portland, OR. Monahan, J. (2013). Violence risk assessment. In I. B. Weiner (Ed.) Handbook of psychology, 2nd ed., (pp. 541–555). New York, NY: Wiley. Pollard, J. W., Nolan, J. J., & Deisinger, E. R. (2012). The practice of campus-based threat assessment: An overview. Journal of College Student Psychotherapy, 26, 263–276. doi:10.1080/87568225.2012.711142
Received November 14, 2013 Revision received May 7, 2014 Accepted May 12, 2014 䡲
© 2014 American Psychological Association 1541-1559/15/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0037202
BRIEF REPORT
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
A Model of Service and Training: Threat Assessment on a Community College Campus David F. Mrad and Antoni J. S. Hanigan
Joyce R. Bateman
Forest Institute
Ozarks Technical Community College
Forensic psychological assessment for targeted violence is a growing area of practice and community need. These threat assessments are particularly challenging on community college campuses given the broad range of students and the limited internal resources. A collaborative model of partnership between a community college and the training clinic of a doctoral program in clinical psychology has been developed and implemented. The model provides needed service to the community college and rich training experiences for doctoral students in psychology. Implementation of similar partnerships in other settings may be limited by the training and experience of doctoral faculty and the openness of behavioral intervention teams to external participants. Keywords: threat assessment, campus violence, consultation
static risk factors. There is typically a sense of urgency. That is, threat assessments occur in real time, with dynamic risk factors constantly changing and often necessitating an immediate reassessment and potential response. Risk assessments, however, typically occur in institutional settings where the evaluator can take time to gather necessary information or obtain additional observation. The results then are often submitted for court proceedings which might occur with some delay. Depending on the specific population to which the subject of interest belongs, the base rates for violence in risk assessments may be low to moderately high (Conroy & Murrie, 2007), but the violence being predicted is often reactive or affective (Meloy, 2006). Threat assessment, on the other hand, is dealing specifically with predatory or intended violence, often mass casualty events, such as school shootings, which have a very low base rate (Meloy, Hart, & Hoffmann, 2014). Given these low base rates, and the urgency involved, Meloy et al. (2014) point out that threat assessments have to rely on an idiographic approach with inductive reasoning. Finally, as is sometimes the case with risk assessment also, the emphasis in threat assessment is on managing, that is, preventing or minimizing, rather than simply predicting violence. Such management often requires flexible and creative strategies (Mohandie, 2013). Unlike risk assessment, where management of risk usually focuses exclusively on the potentially violent subject of concern, threat assessment often entails focusing on protection of potential targets (Meloy et al., 2014). The challenge of assessing threats (trying to distinguish the true positives from the false positives of a very low base rate phenomenon) experienced on all campuses, is made all the more difficult in community college settings because of the open enrollment policies and resulting variability among students (Meloy, 2013). Additionally, unlike many universities, community colleges do not have graduate departments of psychology or medical school de-
The attacks at Columbine High School in 1999, Virginia Tech University in 2007, and Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, have demonstrated that mass murder can occur on any level of academic campuses. Nevertheless, institutions of higher learning remain particularly vulnerable given the open access and freedom of most campuses. As a result, many institutions of higher learning have developed teams to assess and manage risks (Pollard, Nolan & Deisinger, 2012). Organizations such as the National Behavioral Intervention Team Association (NaBITA) and the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals (ATAP) have also grown in response to the need for campuses and workplaces to increase their physical safety by receiving training, sharing ideas, and promoting research concerning threat assessment and management. Although there have been many advances in the research and practice of violence risk assessment in general in the past two decades (Heilbrun, 2009; Monahan, 2013), those advances are of limited utility in the more complex and challenging area of threat assessment. Meloy, Hart, and Hoffmann (2014) identify several significant distinctions between risk assessment and threat assessment. Threat assessments, unlike risk assessments, usually occur in an operational context with an emphasis on dynamic rather than
This article was published Online First July 7, 2014. David F. Mrad and Antoni J. S. Hanigan, School of Professional Psychology at Forest Institute; Joyce R. Bateman, Counseling Services, Ozarks Technical Community College. The authors wish to disclose their employment at Forest Institute and Ozarks Technical Community College, which are reviewed positively in this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to David F. Mrad, School of Professional Psychology at Forest Institute, Springfield, MO 65807. E-mail: [email protected] 16
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
A MODEL OF SERVICE AND TRAINING
partments of psychiatry which might offer expertise in risk or threat assessment. As reported in the American College Counseling Association’s Community College Task Force (CCTF) Survey of Community/2-year College Counseling Services (2013), there is a national trend toward an increase in numbers of students attending college with severe mental health issues (Gallagher, 2012). The Gallagher (2012) and CCTF surveys also report an increasing necessity for counseling staff to provide a greater array of counseling services (e.g., substance abuse prevention services, domestic violence prevention programming, academic advising, career counseling), while still providing appropriate treatment for greater numbers of students, including those with severe mental health issues. The large majority of community college counseling centers across the nation have a very limited number of staff and yet still find a way to provide these comprehensive services, including working with more students with severe psychological disturbance. In some instances across the nation, however, the community college budget has not been able to support the demand for comprehensive counseling services and in these cases, mental health counseling services have been out-sourced.
The Behavioral Intervention Team In response to their challenge, Ozarks Technical Community College (OTC) initiated a creative partnership with the Robert J. Murney training clinic of the School of Professional Psychology at Forest Institute. OTC was established in 1990 and after years of unprecedented growth, is now the third largest community college in Missouri, serving a 12-county area of south central and southwest Missouri with three campuses and two additional education centers. Seventy percent of OTC’s 15,000 credit students qualify for financial aid, 1,300 students report they are first-generation college students, and the average student age is 25. OTC first began offering mental health counseling services in 1997. Its small-staff counseling center (two full-time and two part-time, Master’s level counselors) serves approximately 5% of OTC’s student population annually for individual, mental health counseling services and reaches approximately 20%–30% of the campus population in the wide variety of mental health outreach programs that they sponsor each year. Although counseling services have not been out-sourced at OTC, the counseling staff can attest to these national trends and have therefore found it imperative to identify supports in the community to strengthen the services they can offer students. These supports include the development of the collaborative OTCCares initiative and a model of partnership with the training clinic of a local, professional school of psychology. OTCCares is a set of resources that was established to protect the health and safety of the campus community at OTC. OTCCares brings together resources from Disability Support Services, Safety & Security, Counseling Services, the Dean of Students office, and the Behavioral Intervention Team (BIT) in an effort to reach more students before crises occur. All resources of OTCCares are critical to the success of the initiative; however, it is the BIT that coordinates services for the OTCCares initiative and is the primary focus of this discussion. The BIT employs a formalized approach to addressing mental health issues and other behaviors that either pose a danger of harm to self or others or disrupt the learning environment. The goals of the BIT are: (a) to prevent crises before
17
they occur through the provision of outreach and educational programming, consultation, appropriate assessment and referrals; (b) to ensure that students whose behavior is of concern are contacted through follow-up processes and have access to the appropriate services needed to improve their welfare; and (c) to create a unified and accessible reporting and tracking system that will allow members of the BIT to observe patterns of behavior that may necessitate further assessment and to provide documented responses to distressed students. The BIT initiative has aided in creating an institutional culture of recognizing, responding, reporting, and referring students of concern so that intervention is provided quickly, effectively, and to a broader number of students. After a year of development and training, 2010 marked the formal introduction of the BIT initiative to the OTC community. Six, full-time OTC employees comprise the BIT, including the Director of Counseling, Dean of Students, Assistant Dean of Disability Support Services, Assistant Registrar, College Director of Safety and Security, and a full-time faculty member. All members of the BIT are masters or doctoral level professionals, with extensive experience working in higher education student affairs, administration, and instruction. Members have a combined background in disability support, vocational rehabilitation, law enforcement, military service, student conduct, and two are Licensed Professional Counselors. Since its inception, over 1,600 individual incident reports, (roughly 40 per month) have been submitted through the BIT’s secure, online reporting system. The BIT has become a significant and integral component of OTC’s overall campus safety plan. During their 2 to 3-hr, weekly meetings, members of the BIT review new incident reports, assign appropriate action plans, and provide updates and progress reports on open cases. In addition, team members plan educational outreach activities and professional development events for the campus community in order to further the mission and message of OTCCares and the BIT. In addition to weekly meetings, BIT members regularly consult (often on a daily basis) to ensure collaborative and purposeful interventions with students who have been reported through the BIT. The BIT provides regular, year-round, professional development opportunities to ensure that members of the OTC community understand the kinds of behaviors to report, how to report, and why reporting is essential. In addition to in-person trainings, the OTCCares Web pages (www.otc.edu/otccares) provide resources, FAQs, and detailed instruction on the reporting process. OTC utilizes an online reporting system that has proven to be a secure, easily accessible resource that allows all members of the OTC community (employees, students, and visitors) to report behaviors of concern with confidence and, if preferred, with anonymity. The members of OTC’s BIT possess a wide variety of educational and professional experience. Even with the use of wellrespected behavioral intervention and risk assessment tools, backgrounds in higher education and law enforcement and years of experience in helping students of concern, they recognized that additional resources and expertise were critical in order to provide the most comprehensive and appropriate interventions. Over a decade ago, OTC began a successful partnership with the Robert J. Murney Clinic, the training clinic of the School of Professional Psychology at Forest Institute, in order to provide OTC students an affordable option in securing learning and psychological assessments. Students of concern who required such
MRAD, HANIGAN, AND BATEMAN
18
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
assessments could be easily referred by OTC’s Disability Support or Counseling Services staff to obtain necessary services at the Murney Clinic. The partnership was beneficial both for OTC students and the psychology trainees (clinical psychology practicum students and predoctoral interns) at the Murney Clinic. OTC students received psychological and learning evaluations for a reduced fee and the clinical psychology graduate students assessing them gained valuable, hands-on experience. In 2011, OTC entered into an expanded, contractual relationship with the Murney Clinic of Forest Institute in order to make available additional support for the BIT and expedited threat assessments of students of concern.
The Doctoral Program As a training clinic for clinical psychology doctoral students, the Murney Clinic is a major provider of low-cost, mental health services to the underserved population of southwest Missouri. The academic faculty and practicum supervisors at Forest, where forensic psychology is one of the concentration areas, include members with expertise in forensic psychological assessment. There are three board certified forensic psychologists on faculty. One of them serves as the consultant to OTC. In that role, he is available to the BIT to provide professional development opportunities and for phone or in-person consultation and, along with a doctoral student, attends BIT meetings once a month. Most importantly, he and the student are available to provide threat assessment and comprehensive psychological evaluation services quickly when emergency situations arise. Although a large majority of reports received through the BIT process involve low-level distress, there are occasions when reported student behaviors are severe and appear threatening. When these types of urgent reports are received, responding immediately and with thorough psychological evaluation as part of the threat assessment is critical. The contractual relationship with OTC provides for this immediate response. That response is further enhanced by the monthly participation in the BIT meetings, because the meetings foster an understanding of the OTC culture and the BIT mission and resources, and also a working knowledge of many of the students with whom they work. Like other community colleges, the broad range of programs, admission policies, and affordability of OTC result in a more varied and diverse campus community than typical university campuses. For instance, even without 4-year degrees or graduate programs, the average age of the students is 25 with 6% of them being military veterans. Of those students referred to the BIT, the average age is 28. During the 2-year relationship between OTC and Forest, four students were referred for urgent evaluations. Those evaluations were typically initiated within 2 days of the referral. All four referrals were male students. In only one instance did a verbal threat precipitate the referral. In the other three cases, the referral was in response to various disturbing and escalating behaviors by the students. Only one of the students was traditional college age. The other three students were all older than traditional undergraduates and were veterans. Two of the veterans were experiencing extreme financial stressors, which were at risk of being exacerbated if they were withdrawn from the school and lost their financial aid. This potential highlights one of the complexities of threat assessment in an academic or employment setting. Withdrawal of a student or termination of an employee can be an added
stressor which elevates the risk of violence and reduces the opportunities for intervention or monitoring of the student. In all four cases, the forensic evaluator offered opinions that the students did not present a high risk for imminent violence. The evaluator also recommended follow-up intervention strategies to monitor and manage the risk presented by the students of concern. The partnership between a behavioral intervention team and a training clinic is not only mutually beneficial for the parties involved, but provides additional training and career opportunities for clinical psychology doctoral students. The first doctoral student involved in the evaluations was particularly interested in violence risk and threat assessment. She had taken forensic elective courses in her training at the School of Professional Psychology, including a course on violence risk assessment, which helped prepare her for the practicum experience. Although typical practicum placements allow for real world training in a variety of settings, this particular arrangement provided research inspiration, global networking, and specialized training, as well as the opportunity to discuss threat assessment with many key figures in the field at national conferences of NaBITA and ATAP. In fact, her involvement with the program lead to an opportunity to focus her doctoral research project on assessing the psychometric qualities of a new risk assessment instrument developed by one of those national leaders. In sum, the opportunity helped train her in additional skills she can use to provide similar services in other areas at the end of her training and provided an excellent opportunity for research with a new risk assessment instrument.
Conclusion Although the benefits of the relationship between Ozarks Technical Community College and the School of Professional Psychology at Forest Institute may be unique in that they have accrued not only to both institutions but also specifically to one individual doctoral student, the partnership could serve as a model for similar arrangements. Most clinical psychology doctoral programs have some type of training clinic that provides community service. Many are located in communities where local community colleges or even universities may have a need for psychological consultation and occasionally psychological assessments which need to be rapidly scheduled. Similar arrangements could provide a valuable resource to the community college and a valuable training opportunity to the doctoral program. Of course, the opportunity for similar partnerships to be beneficial would be dependent on the kind of academic training available within the doctoral program, the expertise of the faculty in risk or threat assessment, the capability of the program to provide the faculty supervisor with the time required for this activity, and the openness of the behavioral intervention or threat assessment teams to include external consultants. In the places where those factors exist, and they may be many, comparable arrangements could provide expert assistance in threat management to community college campuses, service opportunities to forensic faculty members, and training opportunities to interested graduate students.
References Community College Task Force. (2013). CCTF Survey 2012–2013. Alexandria, VA: American College Counseling Association.
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
A MODEL OF SERVICE AND TRAINING Conroy, M. A., & Murrie, D. C. (2007). Forensic assessment of violence risk: A guide for risk assessment and risk management. New York, NY: Wiley. doi:10.1002/9781118269671 Gallagher, R. P. (2012). National survey of counseling center directors. Alexandria, VA: International Association of Counseling Services. Heilbrun, K. (2009). Evaluation for risk of violence in adults. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Meloy, J. R. (2006). The empirical basis and forensic application of affective and predatory violence. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 40, 539 –547. doi:10.1080/j.1440-1614.2006.01837.x Meloy, J. R. (2013, September). Advanced threat assessment and threat management. Workshop presented for Specialized Training Services, Portland, OR. Meloy, J. R., Hart, S., & Hoffmann, J. (2014). Threat assessment and threat management. In J. R. Meloy & J. Hoffmann (Eds.), International handbook of threat assessment (pp. 3–17). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
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Received November 14, 2013 Revision received May 7, 2014 Accepted May 12, 2014 䡲
