George Tessar (Attending Psychiatrist)

We thought in view of the comments that he had made and the kind of interaction he'd had with the Changs prior to the hospitalization, that it was only courteous, fair to let them know that he was being discharged.

There was concern that they should be informed that he was no longer in the hospital.

No, we didn't tell the Changs that. Common sense would tell you that you don't know exactly what's going to happen three months down the line.

I don't know. It's certainly an important point to consider.

I suppose it's a conceivable explanation, but a rather naive response to threat.

We made our decisions based on what we thought were reasonable observations and interpretations of what we were seeing, and it could well be that the Changs were as well.

I had some concerns about his veracity.

They weren't consistent concerns from day to day, and by the end of the evaluation, I was quite convinced that he was telling us the truth as he felt it then.

He no longer made those statements about wanting to kill her or feeling any compulsion to kill her. He was feeling better.

Well, I think, yeah, that's possible. He was not conveying the same kind of impression at the end of this hospitalization.

Our clinical experience suggests that we're pretty good at it, at predicting violence in the short term, 24, 48, 72 hours after an evaluation. Beyond that, nobody's very good at predicting violence.