Mandatory reporting

Yes, mandatory reporting laws continue to expand. We also have mandatory reporting laws in Canada. Ian and I recently wrote a paper on this after reviewing the legislation, case law, and ethical complaints. The laws in the US do seem to be much broader though we didn't review these.

In Canada, mandatory reporting is clearly a big barrier to providing services, but we concluded it is not impossible. There are people who manage to provide these services within the scope of mandatory reporting laws.

As part of our research we are surveying clinicians on stigma, knowledge about mandatory reporting, and threshold for reporting. We hope this will help us better understand attitudes of clinicians and how this might impact their threshold for reporting. I think people's interpretation of the law is an interesting thing to focus on. A lot of our education efforts need to also be focused on clinicians as well.