Some problems don’t have easy simple solutions. Any answer will have some outside cases.

If a schizophrenic parent has in the past harmed someone, should a court ignore this when determining custody. It is unfair. If you err on being too lenient some people will be harmed. If you err on being stringent some people will be harmed.

Complex problem cannot be solved with ideology and maxims. All solutions will fail some people sometimes.

Oh right, I don't think I understood what you were saying, then. That's also a good question.

>Such harms can be reliably detected, with stringent enough criteria.

Mental harms, in many cases, can also be detected by competent professionals; besides that, it is entirely possible for physical harms to heal and for supporting evidence of their infliction be used to convict. Further, many physical harms depend at least partially on the victim's characteristics or situation; a concert pianist is arguably harmed more by someone cutting off his finger than a schoolteacher would be, for instance. Many physical harms that are rightfully legislated against often require the testimony of the victim for the case to succeed. For a wide class of 'mental harms' it is accurate to say that they are indeed physiological responses - from PTSD to lethargy and insomnia. This is in contrast to the caricature that mental harms are necessarily merely 'hurt feelings'.

I also have concerns that the difficulty or the fact of sometimes being nebulous features of mental harms should necessarily rule out such lawmaking. At best, the minimum for proving such harm should at least be set out by the legislators or judiciary, if the standard of evidence is the roadblock to legislation.

It's also worth remembering that we're talking about harms here, not mere hurts. Harms are much harder to fabricate than hurts are.

The article you link did not mention the employees saying running the editorial made them "feel unsafe". Neither the word safe nor unsafe appears in the article. It says the article "reportedly elicited strong objections" from the staff.

I don't see this as an argument against such legislation; consider that many physical crimes are also hard (or even impossible) to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, considered case-by-case. Rape very often qualifies here, as does the mens rea of various other crimes, which may rely upon testimony. Both actus reus and mens rea are required for a conviction, and while the actus reus may be easier to prove (but again, in many cases not beyond a reasonable doubt), we do not abolish the role of intention in the justice system simply because it's hard to prove.

Accusations of physical harms can also be concocted as bullying tactics too, in which the harm was suffered as a result of either a self-inflicted injury, or inflicted by somebody else. Such cases can be thrown out due to insufficient evidence. I see no reason why the same cannot be said for a subset of mental harms, in which there are equivalent doctors available to use their expertise to judge the harm.