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Predicting violence and assessing dangerous behavior is difficult in most situations. Yet mental health practitioners, law enforcement personnel and others are required by law to do just that in the normal course of their everyday job performance. While professionals usually tend to overpredict violence, there are times when violence is missed and not predicted.

In addition to predicting violent behavior, mental health and law enforcement professionals are frequently called upon to intervene with someone who is potentially or actually violent. Interacting with an actively violent and dangerous person is a high stress event for most professionals. Specialized trainings for all personnel who are likely to intervene with violent persons are important. Some mental health practitioners and some law enforcement personnel have such training. Many do not.

Effective communication with a potentially violent person is perhaps the most important requirement for defusing a dangerous situation. It is critical for the helping professional or lay person doing the intervention to be an ally and not an enemy. This may be quite a difficult task to accomplish in some cases.

Four times in my career I have been called upon to defuse a potentially deadly situation and take away a gun from someone -- looking down the wrong end of the barrel! One case involved an eleven-year police officer who was divorcing, depressed and very drunk. His chief called to ask if I would hospitalize him, stating he had been in phone contact with him throughout the night and that the officer was depressed and suicidal.

I talked with the officer on the phone for a while. Then my psychological assistant, who had previously been a police officer for a number of years, continued talking to him. The officer agreed to be hospitalized if my assistant and I would transport him to the hospital. I made arrangements with the hospital to accept him.

When we arrived at his trailer home, he was sitting on the front steps barefoot, unshaven and with an empty gallon wine bottle at his side. As we got out of the car he leveled a 357 magnum at us, mumbling that he was going to die and so were we. After about ten minutes he decided that my assistant could live because he had been a police officer, but that I would die with him. I was a young 34 year-old psychologist who had just entered full-time independent practice and I had never seen this man before. I was perhaps eight-to-ten feet away from him and the gun looked very huge and very ugly.

It seemed that the final straw in breaking this officer had been a few weeks before when he arrived on a child abuse scene too late to save a young child from death. He suffered a great deal of pain and guilt about this occurrence and while he had been depressed before, this event precipitated a deep and dysfunctional depression.

I began talking to the officer about how much pain I knew he had to be in to want to die or to kill someone else (me!) and how frightened he must be to be willing to take these actions. I talked with him about my being afraid and not wanting to die. I talked about how both of our families would suffer and while he was hurting and scared and I was scared, he would cause much greater pain to people who loved each of us. For a while the conversation was one-way, but then, gradually he began to dialogue back. It took about forty minutes before he surrendered the gun and willingly got into the car and went to the hospital.

It is mandatory to help the potentially violent person to surrender the means of violence -- any and all weapons. These should be held safely until such a time as the risk of potential violence has subsided and a determination is made about when or even if the person is capable of being given the weapons back.

One way that sometimes is quite effective in defusing potential violence is to help the individual find words for his or her feelings -- angry words, violent words, scared words, sad words, hopeless words, etc. Words help both to safely express and to contain feelings of aggression, rage, discouragement and fear. It is important to help the potentially violent person talk about what went wrong or is wrong RIGHT NOW -- at this point in time. Sometimes this comes out quite directly while other times it comes out garbled and incoherent. The more direct and focused an intervener can help the person be, generally, the more effective the intervention.

Mental health practitioners -- among others, have duties to warn and protect an intended victim when a patient is assessed to be potentially dangerous to that person. There are various ways to meet these requirements. One way I have found to be especially effective is to include the potentially violent patient in the actual process of warning and protecting the intended victim.

I usually, after talking at some length with the patient, make the warning phone call to the intended victim in the presence of the patient. Sometimes, after I have made the introductory remarks to the intended victim, when the patient is able, I ask the patient him or herself to tell the intended victim about his or her anger. Other times, it is even possible to have the intended victim join the mental health practitioner and the patient, and together, face-to-face, tell the person about the threat and its source(s). This process usually has the advantage of substantially defusing and reducing the heightened emotions of a potentially violent person. It also goes a long way toward therapeutically working out the problem.

There are no simple or easy ways of intervening with potentially violent persons, but adequate training, effective communication, weapons removal and defusing the aggression are key factors in preventing violent behavior.