Good enough risk taking

Abstract

People with some psychiatric disorders, as with many other disorders of health, are more likely to pose risks of harm to self or others than healthy people. Effective management and treatment necessarily involves a certain amount of risk taking in this regard. Psychiatrists and their allied professional colleagues, trapped somewhere between medical paternalism and inquiry culture and the civil rights complaints milieu are more inclined than not to share a conservative view of risk taking as the moral equivalent of gambling. The law at present compounds this with its binary, all or nothing, approach to risk assessment, whether in courts or review bodies. More imaginative, yet practical and testable approaches which reflect the dynamic process of risk development and reduction are considered. They are recommended for law and psychiatry, and in particular for the interface between them.