Crystal Ball: Are Behavioral Intervention Teams Asked To Predict The Future?

                A growing trend that is becoming seen as a necessity is behavioral intervention teams or threat assessment teams. The creation of such teams poses two questions.  Are these teams given the expectation of preventing all threatening activity on a campus and community? When do the actions of these teams start to become harmful for those suffering from a mental illness? It has become general consensus at higher education institutions across the nation that the mental health of the students is extremely important and the best preventative measure against threatening situation (Mole). With more and more students attending college that were never able to before (due to scholarship, counseling, and/or medicine), this generation is much more volatile. One “2008 study, conducted by researchers at the National Institutes of Health and titled "Mental Health of College Students and Their Non-College-Attending Peers," found that half of people in the traditional college-age group, ages 18 to 24, met the criteria for a psychiatric disorder.” Taking in all these factors and questions, behavioral interventions teams have a great task outlining their responsibilities.

                In the aftermath of every active shooter situation it is asked if the shooter was displaying any strange behavior. In retrospect at least one person can point to some sort of strange behavior. Behavioral intervention teams are asked to decipher strange behavior before a threatening situation occurs. The shootings in Arizona of Gabrielle Giffords and others was by a young man that had been suspended from a community college because of threatening comments and demeanor (Reiss).   The community college removed him from their environment. Is it their responsibility to protect the community? Can the college force a student to obtain help from mental-health professionals? These questions are the reason why the majority of these teams also include legal staff.  The reality of the situation is that not only are these teams not able to predict every threatening situation that occurs, but their ability to enforce assistant to students is limited. A member of behavioral intervention team at University of Wisconsin’s River Falls campus, Sandi Scott Deux, had this to say about their responsibilities and effectiveness (Wilson):

“We're only human. We're dealing with the same issues that society has. It's no different from trying to stop this in any town or community. Until we can predict human behavior, we're never going to say with 100-percent certainty we can stop this from happening. There are still going to be students who are able to do these kinds of things, who we don't know about or for whom we don't have the right information to proceed in time. Compared to general society, college campuses are still much safer. Are we immune? No.”

                The limit of behavioral intervention teams’ abilities prohibits them from being able to help and/or even diffuse every situation. They have to consider things like privacy laws as well as further damaging someone’s mental health. There is a fear that mandatory mental health screenings of students could turn a minor problem into a major one unnecessarily. These teams face the issue of how to identify those who are at high risk(Han). Most teams have a reporting system that faculty, staff, and students can report to if someone is displaying strange or disturbing behavior (Peterkin). They then gather information on the student and try to look at the whole picture assessing the best way to help and deal with the person. While not a perfect system most school feel with these teams in place campuses are much better off than they were before Virginia Tech occurred (Wilson).

Peterkin, C. (2012) Campus Threat-Assessment Teams Get New Guidance From Mental-Health Groups The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Reiss, B. (2011). Campus Security and the Specter of Mental-Health Profiling. The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Wilson, R. (2009). A Safety Official Discusses How Campuses Handle Threats. The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Mole, B. (2012). Threat-Assessment Teams Face Complex Task of Judging Risk. The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Han, F. (2010). Studies on College Student Psychological Crisis Intervention System. International Journal of Psychological Studies. Vol. 2, No. 1.