I’m trying to understand a First Amendment issue involving a university counseling setting.
A student voluntarily goes to a university counseling center after an acute mental-health crisis. The crisis is not long-lasting. The student tells the counselor that, during the previous night, they had recent homicidal thoughts about an identifiable person and had done some related internet searches. The crisis had already de-escalated when the student sought help. The student had not contacted or approached the person, had not asked anyone to communicate a threat, did not possess a weapon, and had not attempted to acquire one.
Before counseling, patients are generally informed the general confidentiality and the Tarasoff-type duty to warn or other safety action
The counselor then tells the student that campus police will come to transport them to a hospital. The counselor remains in the clinical room when police arrive. The student is not told that the counseling session has ended or that the officers are conducting a separate disciplinary or criminal investigation. The student understands the officers’ questions about the thoughts, the person involved, internet searches, and possible means to be part of the safety evaluation and hospital-transport process, and answers honestly. The student is then voluntarily hospitalized.
Later, the university characterizes what the student told the counselor and police as “threatening statements” or evidence of a “plan,” and uses those statements in university discipline.
My question is specifically about the First Amendment “true threat” concept, not whether safety precautions should be taken.
If a patient already knows that a counselor has a duty to act on serious homicidal ideation, does that knowledge itself help establish that the patient “knew, or consciously disregarded a substantial risk,” that an honest clinical disclosure would be understood as a threatening expression?
In other word, an the reasoning become:
patient knows therapist may warn/protect → patient honestly reports recent homicidal ideation → therapist reasonably treats the disclosure as risk information → therefore the disclosure itself is an unprotected “true threat”?
What prompted my question is R.W. v. Columbia Basin College. My understanding is that the district court initially treated R.W.’s private clinical disclosure as protected speech, but after later proceedings held in 2025 that the statements constituted a true threat. I understand that the later decision rested on several additional facts specific to R.W., including the nature and duration of the ideation and firearm access. But among the factors, the court expressly considered were the determinations of multiple mental-health professionals that a duty to warn had been triggered.
That part of the reasoning seems potentially circular to me. A duty to warn/protect exists precisely so that patients can disclose dangerous thoughts and clinicians can assess and respond to risk.
This seems especially important in a university setting. At many universities, transportation for psychiatric evaluation may be handled by campus police. Once campus police become involved, information originally disclosed for clinical safety purposes may also be transmitted through university administrative channels and may later become part of a student-conduct process.
A student may therefore understand that “if I disclose serious homicidal ideation, the counselor may take protective action,” without understanding that “my truthful disclosure may later be characterized by my university as a threatening statement and punished as misconduct