Youth Violence Assessment is Still Failing

EMED Logic, Inc. Unveils a New Assessment Model Essential to Reversing Bleak Trends

PENSACOLA, Fla., June 8, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Saving life is difficult. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. Indeed, everyone from the FBI to the National Institutes of Mental Health is doing suicide and violence prevention. Yet, historically high U.S. death rates, absolute numbers, and recent revolting school carnage abound across our country.

An ominous and ingrained trend in mental health assessment is the misconception that ideation centered evaluations accurately identify these persons. However, some of these cases are so rapidly progressive and deadly to self or others that they represent the equivalent of an unrecognized anaphylactic-like reaction where family and friends stated, "There were no red flags," and "No one saw it coming." In fact, the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force recently summarized the ineffectiveness of current child, adolescent, and youth screeners. Therefore, the traditional models of assessment must change.

EMED Logic© is the first of its kind assessment to utilize a validated suicide-homicide final common pathway in the calculation of violence in school, clinic, residential, criminal justice, and emergency department (ED) care. Dr. Copelan, a former ED psychiatrist, Psychological Assessment Resources author, and current contributor to MedPage Today’s ‘Suicide-Watch’, is the founder of EMED Logic©. He states, "Comprehensive assessment only favors the well-prepared."

The mission of EMED Logic© can be paraphrased in the words of Abraham Lincoln, "This assessment effort will not follow a beaten path. It seeks areas yet unexplored." Unlike current assessments, this integrated, 2 – 5-minute, multi-tiered, non-stigmatizing, cloud-based assessment utilizes likelihoods and confirmatory, easy-to-use neurologic tests to stratify risk from low to extremely high in persons ages 8 to 65. It is not a substitute for clinical judgment, rather an enrichment to it.

Moreover, the innovative EMED© Logic test considers a spectrum or the dimensionality of basic or emergent mental health symptoms experienced by children, youth, adults, and seniors. These problems, beyond common anxiety and depression, include obvious and unobvious suicidal and violence risk situations as potential consequences of multiple social and psychological factors.

At long last, this guided algorithmic process helps clinicians in multiple settings to answer such agonizing, complex, and atypical clinical questions that impact the safety of our citizens, schools, and communities.

For more information on Dr. Copelan’s work, visit: https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/suicide-watch; https://emedtoday.org

SOURCE EMED Logic, Inc