By Dick Durbin RRSTAR.COM Posted Apr 17, 2008 @ 10:59 PM This week, our nation marked the anniversary of the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech that took 32 lives and wounded 17 other people. Just two months ago, our state was stunned to witness a similar tragic shooting at Northern Illinois University in which 5 students were killed and 17 were wounded. I cannot imagine the magnitude of heartbreak and pain for friends and families of those killed or the trauma borne by those who survived these tragedies. As we mourn the loss of so many promising young lives, it is important also to learn from these tragedies. So what are those lessons? The first is to consider the tortured mind of the shooter. Mental illness is an illness, not a curse. It can and should be treated. Many who receive appropriate counseling and medication lead normal, stable and happy lives. But our laws ignore this reality. We have created legal and financial obstacles to appropriate care. This year, for the first time in a decade, the U.S. Senate has passed a bill to give mental health parity with physical health under the law. The House of Representatives also has passed legislation, and we are negotiating a compromise to fulfill the promise of health parity for millions facing mental health problems. But the challenge of mental health on our college campuses is unique. Many mental illnesses manifest themselves in this period when young people leave the security of home and regular medical care. The responsibility for the students' well-being shifts many times to colleges and universities struggling with limited resources. The situation is growing worse. Studies show that 10 percent of college students have contemplated suicide and 45 percent have felt so depressed that it was difficult to function. Colleges also are encountering students who 10 to 20 years ago would not have been able to attend school because of mental illness, but who can do so today because of advances in treatment of such illness. To meet the increased need, many schools have tried to increase mental-health education and outreach efforts. But the ratio of students to counselors is growing. Currently, there is only one counselor for every 2,000 students on our college campuses. NIU and Virginia Tech taught us that mental-health parity and better campus counseling services are not only critical in preventing these tragedies, but in dealing with the aftermath. The victims were not just those who were killed or injured in the shootings. Others have mental scars that are less obvious than bullet wounds but often slower to heal. The emotional trauma experienced by many students, faculty and families might require years of therapy and counseling. Finally, when the unthinkable does happen, as it did at Virginia Tech and NIU, we need to respond quickly and effectively to the immediate and long-term needs of the affected college community. Our colleges and law-enforcement agencies have made great strides in preparing for and responding to active-shooter situations, progress reflected in the admirable response to the NIU shootings. But we also need to view these violent tragedies on our campuses for what they are â€” catastrophes, like natural disasters, that require a sustained and coordinated recovery effort in the months that follow. We have a federal agency to deal with hurricanes, earthquakes and floods. But there is no central federal resource to help guide college communities through the recovery process. In the days and weeks after the shootings in DeKalb, NIU officials found themselves being led in circles through the bureaucracies at the federal departments of Education, Justice, and Health and Human Services, not to mention numerous state agencies. These entities, all of whom were well-meaning, often didn't talk to one another, forcing school officials and victims' families to navigate a red-tape maze to find answers to even their simplest questions. Just as we expect a coordinated emergency response to a flood or tornado, we need to ensure that victims, their families and college communities are able to receive similar assistance in the wake of these personal disasters. Reflecting on the loss of his own son, the well-known minister the Rev. William Sloan Coffin once said, "When parents die, they take with them a portion of the past. But when children die, they take away the future as well." As we mourn those lost at Virginia Tech, NIU and other schools across the country, we must learn from these incidents, work to avoid them and improve our response when they do occur. Dick Durbin, a Democrat, is a U.S. senator from Illinois. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Generic -- Original Source: http://www.rrstar.com/opinions/x1498098116
By Armin Rosen PUBLISHED APRIL 19, 2007 It unfolded like a terrifying set-piece, and each new item of information seemed more trite and intuitive than the next: the killer had been a student. He had been a social outcast, homicidally contemptuous of the society that he felt had cast him out. The guns used had been purchased legally. And there had been warning signs that now seem to have stopped tantalizingly short of portending the coming carnage. "When this is all said and done," the online magazine Slate cited one blogger as writing a few hours after the shooting, "we will likely have an unhappy young person who probably had an unhealthy obsession with guns, violence, gory video games, and over the top blood-fest movies"-which means that, even in its horrifying randomness, the Virginia Tech shooting takes on a grim aspect of predictability. But what should this predictability teach us? Since noted poet and Virginia Tech English professor Lucinda Roy found Cho Seung-Hui unstable enough to justify contacting campus counseling services over 18 months prior to the attack, it could be argued that universities and society in general should be more aggressive in administering psychological help to those who obviously need it. We Americans are great believers in therapy: with nearly one in four adults seeking professional help and Adderall alone bringing in over a quarter-billion dollars in annual revenue, we, arguably, have put more faith in the redemptive powers of the clinical or prescriptive than any other society on earth. But it would be a mistake to let this past week's events reinforce this notion that normalcy can be clinically prescribed, or, as some have recommended, clinically imposed. As author Deepak Chopra appropriately noted in an interview with CNN, psychologist Abraham Maslow maintains that love and belonging are as fundamental to human existence as food and shelter. And the professional concern of a therapist for her patient can't fill basic emotional or social voids any better than social relationships alone can cure mental illness. Does this teach us that our society predisposes people to committing horrific killing sprees? I, for one, appreciate a certain irony in the fact that this event has ultimately strengthened the very community from which Cho felt so excluded. However, it is patently insensitive to blame the Virginia Tech community for excluding someone who was so invisible to it. And, by all accounts, Cho was not just invisible to those around him, but invisible to himself as well: by shaving off his weapons' serial numbers, carrying no identification, and committing suicide in a way that would obscure his most individual physical feature-his face-he argued against his own humanity and individuality. So if we are to blame the community as a whole for its exclusivity, then it would be disingenuous because we too fail to reach out to those in potential danger of lapsing into a permanent state of social and personal non-existence. But is the existence of such people alone enough to teach us that our society is somehow structured to produce killing sprees like the one at Virginia Tech? In his seminal work, Suicide (1897), sociologist Emile Durkheim poses a similar question, and proceeds to argue that the social and historical consistency of the suicide rate proves the act to be an unalterable "social fact," built into the social structure. It's terrifying to think of the destructive confluence of mental instability, exclusion and a propensity for violence as one such "social fact." But reactions to the massacre suggest that that's exactly how a lot of people feel: for instance, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert blamed a "staggering amount of murders" on "feelings of inadequacy, psychosexual turmoil and the easy availability of guns." According to Herbert, the only item over which we, as a society, have conscious control is the last. Yet, if we learn one thing from the Virginia Tech massacre, it should be the importance of using what sliver of control we do have. We can encourage people like Cho to seek the help they desperately need without expecting that help to be a cure-all. We can reach out to the socially alienated, and make an effort to acknowledge those people who we would usually ignore. We can also limit the availability of handguns. Most importantly, we can insist that this past Monday's event were not structural, and avoid lapsing into the kind of cynicism that might have made such an event possible in the first place. Scores of Facebook groups have a name derived from the phrase "Today, we are all Hokies." The phrase was meant as a show of solidarity with a university suffering in ways none of us can imagine. But as long as we keep internalizing, tolerating, or even ignoring the factors that led to Monday's attack it, also functions as a cynical truth: we are all vulnerable. And in that respect, we are all Hokies. -- Photo By: Shana Rubin Original Source: Columbia Spectator http://www.columbiaspectator.com/node/24952
Armin Rosen (Author)/Shana Rubin (Photo)
Reflections on a Mass Homicide (Commentary)
(PDF, 30KB; Full text below.) Commentary Reflections on a Mass Homicide Jimmy Lee,1 MBBS, MMed (Psych), Tih-Shih Lee,1,2 MD, PhD, FRCP (C), Beng-Yeong Ng,1 MBBS, MMed (Psych), FAMS 1 Department of Psychiatry, Singapore General Hospital, Singapore2 Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, Singapore Address for Correspondence: Dr Tih-Shih Lee, Department of Psychiatry, Singapore General Hospital, Singapore, Outram Road, Singapore 169608. Email: tihshih.lee@gms.edu.sg Introduction The names "Virginia Tech" and "Cho" will be associated forever with the tragic mass homicide of 32 persons cum suicide by Seung-Hui Cho on 16 April 2007. In the aftermath, many questions have been posed: "What happened and why?", "Was he crazy?", "Could it have been prevented?", "Could it happen here?" This was the third mass killing in a US campus, with the largest number of fatalities. The first was in 1966 in the University of Texas with 16 dead and 31 wounded, then the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, in which 13 students were killed. We do not profess to know more about what happened in Blacksburg, Virginia, or Cho's neuropsychiatric condition than whatever is published in the popular press.1 But through a series of questions, we reflect on this tragedy, attempt to place it into a human and psychiatric perspective, and offer insights into if, and how, it can be averted in the future. Question 1: Was Cho insane? Cho was described as a shy and quiet child, who was good in mathematics, but struggled with English. There were allegations of him being taunted and bullied in school since young. Both his pastor and relatives had suspected he might be autistic and suggested professional assistance. There was no record of him being involved in overt violence except that he had harassed 2 female classmates, one of whom called in the campus police. He expressed suicidal ideation and was involuntarily committed by a judge in a mental health facility briefly for assessment. A psychiatrist wrote in his chart, "Affect is flat and mood is depressed" and "Insight and judgment are normal," and released him. He was supposed to have been on some treatment regimen but may not have adhered to it. In English Literature classes he wrote on haunting themes of violence and death. Moreover, from the rantings of his final macabre video, it can be inferred that he had grandiose and persecutory thoughts. One could conceivably argue that anybody who murders en masse and then commit suicide must be insane. But insanity is an imprecise term that is no longer in the psychiatric lexicon. So we ask if he met criteria for a diagnosis based on Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV (DSM-IV) or International Classification of Disease-10 (ICD-10)? Or was he of a criminal antisocial or psychopathic mind? Unfortunately without having interviewed him or having access to his records, we cannot say for sure. We could speculate that he was depressed with delusional thoughts, and perhaps had undiagnosed Asperger's disorder (a mild variant of autism), or was taking illicit substances. But we do not have enough evidence to be certain of a definitive psychiatric condition that could account for his extremely violent behaviour. Question 2: Was it due to psychosocial developmental difficulties? Cho emigrated at the age of 8 years from South Korea and had difficulty speaking English. He was reportedly ostra-cised by his classmates and was isolated. The effects of migration on mental health are well described in the litera-ture. In the US, alienation is a problem for many Asians. Among Southeast Asians, the Hmong feel the most alien-ated, followed by Cambodians, Laotians, and Vietnamese.2 Many symptoms could be due to acculturative difficulties, racism, and overwork. A migrant faces difficulties with 3 main areas; changes in social environment, changes in interpersonal relations, and cultural differences.3 Reports from those who knew Cho strongly supported the roles of these 3 factors in his maladjustment to the new country. From his video and writings, it is evident that he had tremendous envy and rage projected onto better-adjusted and well-to-do American kids. Southeast Asian refugees have higher rates of brief reactive psychosis and paranoid psychosis compared to other Americans.4,5 Sometimes paranoia develops among Southeast Asians when they are dealing with a new environment and experiencing "varying degrees of miscommunication, fear of rejection, and feeling mistreated, slighted or discriminated against".6 Psychosis among Southeast Asians can take the form found in many ethnic groups, e.g. "Aliens' paranoid psychosis", a syndrome characterised by a usually short-lived xenophobia and by feelings of persecution because one belongs to an ethnic minority group.7 On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of immigrants and minorities are well-adjusted and functioning, despite having endured many of the same stressors that Cho endured. In particular, his sister, who shares much of his genetic substrate and environmental milieu, had apparently been doing very well. Many immigrants may have coping difficulties, but they do not usually resort to violence. The other 2 campus mass murderers were neither immigrants nor from minority groups. So, whereas difficulties relating to migration probably played a part in his violence, it would be simplistic to attribute it to primarily these stressors. Instead it would be a disservice to the large immigrant and ethnic minority communities. Question 3: What factors may have precipitated Cho's sudden outburst? There is a small literature considering situational factors and triggers that have consistently been found to be important in initiating a homicidal episode. Triggers for murder in Ressler et al's study8 included financial, legal, employment, marital and other conflicts. Emotional states such as frustration, anger, hostile moods, and feeling agitated and excited were reported at a lower frequency. Levin9 has offered a four-factor model of sudden indiscriminate mass killing. First, the potential offender has led a "life of frustration"; second, he has access to, and the ability to use, firearms; thirdly, there is a significant destabilising experience of a loss of "social controls", such as moving to a new area or the loss of an important relationship; fourth, there must be a precipitating event such as unemployment or divorce. Gresswell and Hollin10 have suggested that a more useful way of conceptualising the "firearms" component would be to consider that a fascination with weapons indicates a style of coping with stress, frustration, and low self-esteem that includes violent fantasies involving weapons. In such cases, the nature of such fantasies may be the best predictor of a homicidal response to a stressful event. Questions 4: Is there a neurological basis for aggression? Aggression refers to behaviour that is intended to cause harm, and is the behavioural manifestation of disturbances in the brain or mind. We now have some, though incomplete, appreciation of various neuroanatomical structures that may be involved in aggression. These structures include the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, hypothalamus, and temporal lobe. In particular, some evidence suggests frontal lobe dysfunction in violent and criminal behaviour, especially in the presence of focal orbitofrontal lobe injuries.11 Brower and Price11 proposed that clinically significant focal frontal lobe dysfunction is associated with aggressive dyscontrol. Orbitofrontal syndrome is associated with behavioural excesses, impulsivity, disinhibition and mood lability. Outbursts of rage and violent behaviour occur after damage to the inferior orbital surface.12 Abnormal brain concentrations of the neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine and gamma-aminobutyric acid are implicated in impulsivity and aggression.13 Pharmaco-therapy with selective serotonergic reuptake antagonists, antipsychotics as well as mood stabilisers have all been used in treatment, with mixed results. Studies of aggression in patients with brain injury suggest that their aggression tends to be (1) reactive, i.e., triggered by modest stimuli; (2) non-reflective, i.e., not premeditated or planned; (3) non-purposeful, i.e., does not serve long-term goals; (4) explosive; (5) periodic; and (6) ego-dystonic.12 Some of these features describe Cho's aggression. But we do not know, and may never know, if a definable lesion was present in Cho's brain, or if present, whether that was severe enough to account for the violent behaviour. With the evolving science on aggression, a discussion about "nature versus nurture" often arises, i.e. whether murderers are born or bred. Research has now demonstrated that genetic aberration per se is not the sole reason leading to violence; environmental factors such as childhood adversities play a significant part in the development of violent behaviour.14 Gene expression is influenced by environmental factors, and brain circuits are affected by life experiences. Question 5: How is dangerousness assessed? Psychiatrists are often called upon to determine how much a threat someone will pose to others and society, also known as dangerousness. Dangerousness is a subjective assessment of the element of danger attributed to a particular person and is qualitative in nature. Predicting dangerousness, particularly in an extreme form such as mass homicide, has been an elusive goal for those investigators who have attempted it. It is often said that "Hindsight is 20/20". When a person is exposed to be a murderer, we tend to focus on those warning signs in his character and biography that were previously ignored. For a category of violence such as mass homicide, however, the low base rate and consequent likelihood of finding false-positive results are overwhelming.15 Just as in Cho's instance, numerous questions were raised about the concerns of his teachers and the psychiatric assessment in November 2005. It must be emphasised that the assessment of dangerousness is not an exact science, and cannot yield a black-and-white result of "dangerous" versus "not dangerous". In our psychiatric assessments, we weigh various factors such as past history of violence, history of mental illness, personality, social background, context and state of mind in which dangerous behaviours manifest. Past behavioural patterns provide the best insight into future behaviours. However, the accuracy of dangerousness assessments quoted in the literature is as low as 0.33.16 Mossman17 in 1994 extracted 58 datasets from 44 published studies, and revealed that mental health professionals' violence predictions were better than chance. Current risk assessment tools such as the Historical/Clinical/Risk Management 20-item (HCR-20)18 and Psychopathy Checklist (revised) (PCL-R)19 offer a structured and more systematic approach to violence prediction, but none could tell with consistent (surely not 100%) accuracy that a person would re-offend. Homicide is clearly the most serious of all crimes. Approximately two-thirds of homicides involve the killing of a victim by a partner, relative, friend or acquaintance. This may partly explain why the clear-up rate for these crimes is particularly high - the police do not need to look very far in order to solve the majority of murders.20 The relation between mental illness and dangerous behaviours has been overemphasised, especially in the eyes of the public. There is a tendency to believe that murderers are mentally ill. However, a recent study among homicides in Singapore showed that 57% of murderers have no mental illness. Out of the 110 charged with murder, depressive disorders accounted for 9.1% and schizophrenia, 6.4%.21 The proportion of foreigners (defined here as non-citizens and non-permanent residents) who committed murder in Singapore was significantly higher compared with locals, which supports the earlier point about the stressors of migration. Also, foreigners tend to suffer from more serious psychiatric disorders, are less likely to have a known history of violence, and are more likely to be new to psychiatric services.22 This implies that the first violent outburst is usually the first presentation to psychiatric services. Cho did not have a history of overt violence prior to April 16. Question 6: What about the psychological trauma to family and friends of the victims? For those who saw their friends getting shot and killed, those who were injured and those who survived unharmed, the families and friends of the victims, it would be very difficult to collectively summarise the ordeal they went and are still going through, as each will have their own individual experience of it. Some may be at high risk of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but others will cope fairly well with milder symptoms. But it is safe to say that life will never be the same again. And we must not forget the hapless and unfortunate family of Cho, whose suffering cannot be fathomed. There were positive measures taken by the school and public authorities in the aftermath that are worth learning. The measures included leave from school, time and ceremony to grief, and the provision of counsellors to all students of the school. School events such as examinations and convocation ceremonies continued as usual in an attempt to restore normalcy. The telecast of Cho's video on national TV was highly controversial. Many others around the world later saw Cho's nefarious video and images of the "massacre". The national broadcast potentially traumatised viewers and re-traumatised survivors. In addition, it helped Cho achieved his aim of broadcasting his views, possibly achieving "martyrdom", and it may inadvertently encourage copycat murderers, as if a race were on to increase the body count. We would strongly urge that TV network companies and their regulating agencies revisit the guidelines and regulations on such telecasts. Question 7: Can it happen to us? Mass murder in a US school or college is a relatively rare event - three times in 40 years, despite the widespread availability of firearms and the large numbers of disenfranchised youths. Hence, it can be described as a low-probability, catastrophic-outcome event, like an earthquake occurring on a given day. The probability of its happening is very low, but once it hits, the results may be catastrophic. For countries with strict firearm and explosive control laws, the risk of a mass murder on the same scale is much lower. With the benefit of hindsight, to discuss what the psychiatrist or the judge should have diagnosed or done is moot now. There was and always will be a balance between protection for society and infringement of the individual's civil liberties. This dilemma is all the more difficult if the assessment is made before a crime is actually committed. It would be virtually impossible for a psychiatrist to predict which of the patients would commit violence, least of all mass murder. If the decision is to commit the patients as a preventive measure, how long should the internment last, and who would set him free? Nevertheless, for psychiatrists and all doctors, this is a timely reminder to be thorough and diligent in the assessment for dangerousness, and to acknowledge that we are far from perfect in our assessments. Under Section 34 of the Mental Disorders and Treatment Act (1973, revised in 1985), any registered physician in Singapore may refer a patient suspected to be of unsound mind or requiring psychiatric treatment to the Institute of Mental Health (IMH) for evaluation and treatment. IMH is the only gazetted mental hospital that has the statutory authority to hold patients involuntarily, should the person be deemed to be suffering from a mental illness, and detention serves the person's best interests and those of other persons. For the majority of patients who are deemed not to need involuntary hospitalisation, there is little we can do to enforce treatment, other than relying on the family to supervise medications and appointments. If we suspect that a patient may pose a specific threat to another person, we may face an ethical dilemma with regard to confidentiality. This issue brings us back to the landmark Tarasoff case where the Californian courts found the therapist negligent for not warning the intended victim of a threat.23 Kok et al24 discussing this case with regard to the applicability of the Tarasoff ruling in Singapore, concluded that in the absence of local case law, a psychiatrist caught in this situation should consult the Singapore Medical Council prior to breaching doctor-patient confidentiality. The Cho case also brings to mind the problems of troubled youths in Singapore - a combination of disengagement from society, low self-esteem, poor coping with rising expectations, and academic pressures. These forces predispose them to seek alternative forms of release and validation, such as using illicit substances and joining street gangs. Therefore, parents and school authorities should always be on the lookout for troubled or poorly adjusted youths. If need be, they should be referred to mental health professionals for evaluation and treatment. Another lesson in the local context would be for us, as a society, to be more tolerant and empathic to those who are less well-adjusted and successful, especially foreigners and migrants, so as to minimise resentment and wrath. Conclusion In summary, as we try to make sense of this apparently senseless violence, we find ourselves in the recurring debate of nature versus nurture. We probably will never know what Cho was really thinking when he pulled the trigger repeatedly, or nor can we be sure if he had a psychiatric condition that fulfilled DSM IV or ICD-10 criteria. Our hypothesis is that he had an underlying neurobiological or genetic vulnerability; he endured developmental psychosocial stressors in a chronic invalidating environment; and that finally some yet unknown "third-hit" triggered his rampage. Nevertheless, we highlight the need for thorough assessments of dangerousness by mental health professionals despite the limitations of our tools; the need for a system to attend to the psychological anguish of the survivors and loved ones of the victims; and the need for us collectively to adopt a more empathic stance towards our less fortunate brethren. We also remember the 33 lives extinguished and countless more traumatised on that Spring day in 2007. REFERENCES Thomas E. Special Report: Making of a Massacre. Newsweek April 30, 2007:18-30. Nicassio P. Psychosocial correlates of alienation: study of a sample of Indochinese refugees. J Cross-cultural Psychol 1983;14:337-51. Moilanen I, Myhrman A, Ebeling H, Penninkilampi V, Vuorenkoski L. Long-term outcome of migration in childhood and adolescence. Int J Circumpolar Health 1998;57:180-7. Nicassio P. The psychosocial adjustment of the Southeast Asian refugee: an overview of empirical findings and theoretical models. J Cross-Cultural Psychol 1985;16:153-73. Westermeyer J. Paranoid symptoms and disorders among 100 Hmong refugees: a longitudinal study. Acta Psychiatr Scand 1989;80:47-59. Lin KM. Psychopathology and social disruption in refugees. In: Williams C, Westermeyer J, editors. Refugee Mental Health in Resettlement Countries. Washington, DC: Hemisphere Publishing, 1986. Tung TM. Psychiatric care for Southeast Asians: How different is different? In: Owan T, editor. Southeast Asian Mental Health: Treatment, Prevention, Services, Training, and Research. Washington, DC: US Department of Health and Human Services, 1985:5-40. Ressler PK, Burgess AW, Douglas JE. Sexual homicide: patterns and motives. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1988. Levin J. Why his last shot blew the truth away. The Sunday Times, London 1987, August 23, p23. Gresswell DM, Hollin CR. Multiple murder: a review. Br J Criminology 1994;34:1-14. Brower MC, Price BH. Neuropsychiatry of frontal lobe dysfunction in violent and criminal behaviour: a critical review. J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry 2001;71:720-6. Silver JM, Yudofsky SC, Anderson KA. Aggression. In: Silver JM, McAllister TW, Yudofsky SC, editors. Textbook of Traumatic Brain Injury. Washington, DC: American Pychiatric Publishing, 2005. Swann AC. Neuroreceptor mechanisms of aggression and its treatment. J Clin Psychiatry 2003;64 Suppl 4:25-35. Reif A, Rosler M, Freitag CM, Schneider M, Eujen A, Kissling C, et al. Nature and nurture predispose to violent behaviours: serotonergic genes and adverse childhood environment. Neuropsychopharmacology 2007. Fox JA, Levin J. Serial murder: myths and realities. In: Smith MD, Zahn MA, editors. Studying and Preventing Homicide: Issues and Challenges. California: Sage Publications, 1999. Monahan J. The prediction of violent behaviour: Toward a second generation of theory and policy. Am J Psychiatry 1984;141:10-5. Mossman D. Assessing predictions of violence: Being accurate about accuracy. J Consult Clin Psychol 1994;62:783-92. Webster CD, Douglas KS, Eaves D, Hart SD. HCR-20: Assessing risk for violence (version 2). Burnaby, BC: Mental Health Law and Policy Institute, Simon Fraser University, 1997. Hare RD. The Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. 2nd ed. Toronto, Canada: Multi-Health Systems, 2003. Ainsworth PB. Psychology and Crime: Myths and Reality. Edinburgh: Pearson Education Ltd, 2000. Koh KG, Gwee KP, Chan YH. Psychiatric aspects of homicide in Singapore: a five-year review (1997-2001). Singapore Med J 2006;47:297-304. Koh KG, Peng GK, Huak CY, Koh BK. Migration psychosis and homicide in Singapore: a five year study. Med Sci Law 2006;46:248-54. Tarasoff v Regents of University of California. California Report 1976;118:129. Kok LP, Yap HL, Cheang M. Mental disorders and public safety of the community at large - does the Tarasoff principle apply in Singapore. Ann Acad Med Singapore 2002;31:535-6. -- Archived with permission of the editor. Original Source: Annals, Academy of Medicine, Singapore, June 2007, Vol. 36 No. 6 http://annals.edu.sg/PDF/36VolNo6Jun2007/V36N6p444.pdf
Jimmy Lee, Tih-Shih Lee, and Beng-Yeong Ng
Kirat Kaur (Ms) Editorial Executive Annals, Academy of Medicine, Singapore annals@academyofmedicine.edu.sg
My youngest son, Travis Miller graduated from Virginia Tech in 2006, and my experiences goe back gto my early teens. As a woman, a Mom, and a researcher, the events of April 16, 2007, grabbed my full attention, and still do. You see, since 1993, I have been treated for a condition, called Bipolar/Manic Depression. My losses have been many, and severe, as in those 14 years, due to the disease, I had no judgment, no sense of reality. I have all my charts, and I now know I was very over medicated by my EX Dr of some 12 years. Life altering changes occured, for myself, and my 3 sons [who were not educated, nor had therapy] which resulted in Dad walking away, after 5 years. Treating mental illness, as something one chooses, or can "snap out of" is extreamly uneducated. The past 3 years, I have dedicated myself to research, and to understanding the past, as to understand the present, and hopefuly simplifly the future. Including my sons somewhat in the exploration, led to estrangement, and Family Protective Orders. I was not included in my son's graduation of 2006. Isolation, since 1993, continues from my family, but I now have a better understanding, throught my faith, Buddhism. I accept my part, and thankfully, injoy a full remission, which requires no prescriptive medication at present. But there is still fall out, and I am fighting the good fight, to bring awareness to Virginia, the Nation on the subject of Mental Health. Trying to understand April 16, 2007, I did know perhaps better that most, how Cho might have acted out his terror, his emense anger, at his perceived rejection, his isolation. I think he fell through the many "cracks" as it were, and that as a state with a D- rating by Nami, [mental health ass.] we have the chance for change. I wrote a Letter to the Roanoke times, on a bill before Congress, up in September for vote, on teaching K-12, good mental health. Yes, we need the tools, we need the education, to demistify, what is baseicaly a "chemical imbalnce", widely unreported, and over or undermedicated, and yes, ignored by too many. It is up to each of us to know, and to be aware of the very real symtoms, of mental illness. And I personaly want to do all I can to help, as I council freely in my hometown, happily 2 friends have also seen the "root' of their depression, and no longer take prescription medication, and are doing great. It is a process, and that is called life.
By:Sarah A. Newlin Posted: 4/27/07 I am writing in response to Richard Poskozim's opinion piece in the 4/25 issue of The Lantern. In the article, the author seems to imply that Cho's motivation to kill somehow originated from his alleged mental illness: "After everything that's come out about him, I think it's pretty safe to say his motivation was that he was crazy." While it is clear that something had deeply distressed Mr. Cho, one should be careful about jumping to conclusions about how mental illness played a role in this tragic event. Numerous studies have shown that it is incredibly rare for someone with a mental illness to commit gross acts of violence, especially on the scale of the Virginia Tech shootings. Violence is no more prevalent among individuals with mental illnesses than among the general public. In actuality, those suffering from a mental illness are more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators. Furthermore, I am concerned that the focus on the shooter's possible mental illness will cause many students on college campuses who suffer from mental illnesses to not seek mental health services or to be feared and shunned by their peers, leading to their further isolation and discrimination. If any positives can come out of this horrible event, I hope that one will be a larger discussion about the need for increased recognition of mental health issues among college students and the need for adequate treatment, support and recovery resources on college campuses. I ask that The Lantern staff take this into consideration as they continue to cover the tragic circumstances surrounding the Virginia Tech shootings. Sarah A. Newlin Program Manager Campus Suicide Prevention Program -- Original Source:The Lantern - April 27, 2007
Threats to Civil Liberties arising from the fallout of the Virginia Tech Forcible-disarmament Frenzy
May 1, 2007 4:51 pm An article from a new contributor: Loren Bliss THERE ARE TWO EXCEPTIONALLY grave dangers to American liberty arising from the present, post-Virginia-Tech forcible-disarmament frenzy. These are: (1)-The criminalization of even the mildest forms of mental illness, as proposed by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY), in HR 297. (2)-The criminalization of political protest and dissent, as proposed by Sen. Frank Lautenberg, (D-NJ), in S 1237. Each of these measures is enthusiastically supported by the Bush Regime. The Lautenberg bill was written at White House/Justice Department request â€” a leading Democratic senator serving as the mouthpiece for a despised Republican administration â€” an unprecedented act of collaboration with the most corrupt regime in U.S. history. Once again, opposition to the Second Amendment is being used as a diversion behind which to conceal an all-out, bipartisan attack on the entire Bill of Rights- including, via S 1237, repeal of the presumption of innocence that is the cornerstone of all English-language jurisprudence. Meanwhile, welcome to the New American Reich, where (if McCarthy, Lautenberg and Bush have their way), anybody deemed a mental case, an effective labor activist or a disruptive political nonconformist will soon be forcibly disarmed, denied all rational means of self defense and thereby condemned to perpetual victimhood. ********* Modern efforts to criminalize mental dysfunction have a long history dating back to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany and are typically part of a broader right-wing agenda of oppression and euthanasia. But in the United States, the primary advocates of criminalization are the forcible disarmament cult and the Communitarian movement, members of which universally (and often vehemently) claim to be leftists and/or "progressives." The Communitarians have argued for at least two decades that diagnosis of mental illness should instantly terminate not only all one's civil rights but also strip one of all privileges as well, driver's licenses included, after which the victim of such determination could then theoretically earn back the abolished rights and privileges in carefully supervised increments. Toward this end the Communitarians â€” who despite their leftist disguise and innocuous-sounding name are radical Skinnerian fascists of the harshest sort â€” are demanding creation of a national registry of mental patients. Deliberately established and maintained as a powerfully oppressive tool of social control, this roster of official pariahdom would include the names of anyone now or ever in any form of mental health treatment, regardless of the relative mildness or severity of the condition for which they are being treated. (Google "communitarians" and scroll at will for additional information.) Despite its huge contempt for the Constitution, the Communitarian faction is but one small portion of the forcible disarmament cult, but it is probably disproportionately powerful. Its intellectual prowess is considerable, and it often assumes a behind-the-scenes leadership role, focusing on the development of strategy, tactics and ideology. Another venue of profound Communitarian influence is the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. It was the Communitarians who provided the Clintons and their cronies with the ideological justification for the Democratic Party's abandonment of New Deal principles and its subsequent wholesale betrayal of the working class. The Communitarians' grasp of Orwellian principles is also very evident in the present-day effort to redefine forcible disarmament as "gun safety" and the present tactic of concealing disarmament schemes behind apparently friendly but patently false gestures toward firearms owners. All this dovetails neatly with the broader forcible-disarmament-cult agenda of reducing legal firearms ownership by any means possible. Since it is credibly estimated as many as 50 percent of all U.S. citizens will at some time require some form of mental health treatment ("treatment" defined in the broadest sense, to include grief counseling, post-divorce therapy and even self-esteem classes or remedial reading for dyslexics), a favorite ploy of forcible disarmament fanatics is to demand closure of "the mental health loophole" in such a way that participation in any treatment process is penalized by automatic forcible disarmament: either turn in your guns before you see the professional caregiver, or the police will soon be there to kick in your front door, shoot your dogs, wreck the interior of your house by violent search and terrorize your spouse and children into lifelong bouts of shivering catatonia. Typically â€” and the forcible disarmament advocates make no secret of the fact they are obscenely aroused by the prospect of unleashing such police brutality against firearms owners â€” this means criminalizing all forms of mental illness or mental dysfunction and thereby forcibly disarming anyone who is or ever has been in any sort of therapy or formalized healing, permanently abolishing their gun rights, no appeal allowed. This is already the law in New York City â€” if you consult a mental health professional even once in NYC (no matter the nature of your problem), your name is reported to the police and you lose your gun rights forever. Indeed, the Democrats attempted to impose a similar restriction on Washington state residents in 1994, but it was vigorously resisted there by a coalition of mental health professionals, who recognize in such criminalization a huge disincentive to voluntary treatment. Which brings us to the present "mental health loophole" bill pending in Congress. As originally written, it was called the "Our Lady of Peace Act" (Google for details), and it would have permanently denied firearms ownership to anyone "adjudicated as a mental defective or committed to a mental institution," which is further defined as occurring whenever "a court, board, commission, or other lawful authority determines that an individual is mentally retarded or of marked subnormal intelligence, mentally ill, or mentally incompetent" (HR 4757, 2002, Sec. 103 and 103:c). By including the phrase "other lawful authority," the measure would have empowered any psychiatrist, psychologist or even guidance counselor to deny someone their gun rights forever, merely by declaring that person "mentally ill" â€” a designation that covers everything from definitively murderous Andrea Yates/Cho Seung Hui psychosis to the mildest cases of neurotic nail-biting and low-self-esteem fidgets. The generic designation "mentally ill" would also have allowed the forcible disarmament of anyone ever found to be "mentally disabled" â€” never mind that "mental disability" is a very specifically focused evaluation of one's employability or lack thereof, typically for purposes of granting welfare stipends or Social Security disability payments. Thus a finding of "mental disability" has absolutely nothing to do with one's suitability to own firearms, vote or exercise any other Constitutional right. But the Our Lady of Peace Act, which McCarthy has introduced in every Congress since 2002, would nevertheless require the Social Security Administration and every state welfare agency to add to the federal government's computerized catalogue of criminals the name and dossier of every individual who had ever been found to be even temporarily "mentally disabled" â€” resulting in a permanent loss of Second Amendment rights against which there would be no possibility of defense or appeal. Thus criminalizing "mental disability" (or any other mental disorder in even the mildest forms) would clearly further the forcible disarmament cult's long range objective of making the requirements for legal firearms ownership increasingly prohibitive â€” ultimately reducing the number of legal firearms owners by the aforementioned 50 percent. The cult's triumph would be all the greater for the fact the imposition of "prohibited person" status would allow disarmament by outright seizure, thereby exempting government from any compensatory (buy-back) costs. Under extreme pressure from mental health professionals, McCarthy has slightly modified her present proposal, HR 297, so that those denied their Second Amendment rights on the basis of mental health considerations would be specifically limited to persons who have been "adjudicated as mentally defective or...committed to mental institutions." Alas, the term "mental defective" remains undefined â€” leaving unanswered whether it includes those who have been found to be "mentally disabled." It also leaves a number of other questions as to its scope, such as whether a child diagnosed as suffering from attention deficit disorder is to be branded "mentally defective" and therefore â€” after reaching adulthood â€” denied firearms ownership for life. Apparently â€” though this is not clear either â€” McCarthy has meanwhile broadened the term "committed" to make it as prohibitive as possible: that is, to permanently deny gun rights to anyone formally committed to a mental institution of any kind (including out-patient clinics) regardless of whether the commitment was mandatory (court ordered) or voluntary. (Present federal law allows those who undergo voluntary commitment to retain their Second Amendment rights unless other specific prohibitions apply.) Furthermore, McCarthy â€” who formerly made no secret of her froth-at-the-mouth hatred of firearms and firearms owners but now (in service to the Democrats' new deception policy) speaks much more softly â€” recently told ABC News that in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, she would amend the bill back to its original, criminalize-all-mental-disorder wording except for the fact "the NRA...is holding everybody hostage." Given that the National Rifle Association has supported the Our Lady of Peace Act from the very beginning, HR 297 included, McCarthy's accusation is not only false but is an especially misleading, hypocritical and even malicious claim: no surprise given the infinite maliciousness that is the forcible disarmament hysteric's most notorious characteristic. But on the HR 297 issue, the NRA (to which I have belonged since 1951) is equally treacherous and hypocritical, especially given its demonstrably false claim to be a defender of the entire Bill of Rights. Indeed the NRA's opposition to the civil rights of mental patients reveals the frustrating extent to which the organization has deteriorated into nothing more than an instrument of the Republican Party. (And the Republican Party â€” especially since Big Business America's 1930s alliance with Hitler, Mussolini and Franco â€” is itself the U.S. equivalent of the fascist parties that formerly dominated Europe.) Thus the NRA implicitly embraces the right wing position that "mental defectives" should be savagely oppressed if not actually euthanized. Not that the NRA is out of step with American opinion: most U.S. citizens â€” though they are loathe to admit it â€” emphatically agree that "mental defectives" deserve the harshest treatment possible. As a consequence, the U.S. has long been infamous for the industrial world's most superstitiously ignorant fear of mental affliction and its most violent rejection of anyone so afflicted, attitudes that have been credibly traced to the enduring influence of Abrahamic religion and the grave extent to which our society remains a defacto theocracy. (Anyone who doubts this assessment of our national values need look no further than our officially murderous hatred of those who are homeless.) Meanwhile other Second Amendment advocacy groups remain stonily silent on the patient-rights implications of forcible disarmament,* understandably (given these selfsame U.S. attitudes) terrified they will be accused of supporting "guns for crazies." Never mind that study after study proves mental patients are statistically no more dangerous than any other group of Americans â€” and far less dangerous than some. _________ *Gun Owners of America has vehemently opposed the Our Lady of Peace Act and HR 297, and it has done so for the very best of reasons: these measures could "bar mentally stable people from buying guns" merely because they had sought mental health treatment, and it is "morally and constitutionally wrong to require law-abiding citizens to first prove their innocence to the government before they can exercise their rights â€” whether it's Second Amendment rights, First Amendment rights, or any other right." Alas, GOA â€” which based on its rhetoric seems to be very closely tied to the Christian Theocracy faction of the Republican Party â€” also opposes such legislation for the very worst of reasons: it echoes the traditional Jewish/Christian/Islamic stance that the husband is god's representative in the household and, as god's enforcer, has unlimited god-given right to beat his wife and children. Thus GOA protests that denying guns to family patriarchs convicted of domestic violence is inflicting punishment for "very minor offenses that include pushing, shoving or...merely yelling at a family member" â€” never mind the bloody testimony of Crystal Brame's death and far too many other murders just as bad or worse. ********* The criminalization of labor activism, political agitation and effective dissent is not the stated purpose of Lautenberg's newly introduced S 1237, which was dropped in the Senate hopper very late Friday 27 April 2007, the introduction obviously timed to minimize public disclosure and avoid press scrutiny. But given that the Republicans now and for a long while have condemned anyone who opposes FÃ¼hrer George Bush and his New American Reich, denouncing each opponent as a "terrorist" or "terrorist sympathizer," the impact of the measure is made obvious by its stated purpose: "to increase public safety by permitting the Attorney General to deny the transfer of firearms or the issuance of firearms and explosives licenses to known or suspected dangerous terrorists." Predictably, Bush himself has already demanded S 1237's immediate enactment. Just as predictably, Lautenberg â€” perhaps even more fanatical a forcible disarmament advocate than McCarthy â€” lauds its unprecedented subversion of the Constitutionally implied principle of presumed innocence as "too long" overdue. Absolute proof of the calculated political malevolence embodied in the Lautenberg proposal â€” proof too of how the Democrats have finally abandoned any pretense of being civil libertarians and now (in the name of forcible disarmament) fully and even gleefully embrace the Bush Regime's agenda of totally nullifying the Bill of Rights â€” is found in the federal government's post-9/11 redefinition of the term "terrorism" to include any form of political protest that is genuinely disruptive. Participants in a legitimate strike or a protest that blocks or even slows vehicular traffic could thus be persecuted as "terrorists." Quoth the American Civil Liberties Union in an analysis disseminated on 6 December 2002: "The definition of domestic terrorism is broad enough to encompass the activities of several prominent activist campaigns and organizations. Greenpeace, Operation Rescue, Vieques Island and World Trade Organization protesters and the Environmental Liberation Front have all recently engaged in activities that could subject them to being investigated as engaging in domestic terrorism." Meanwhile Reason magazine, the official journal of the Libertarian Party, has repeatedly noted that in the eyes of the Bush Regime, "terrorist" and "enemy combatant" are synonymous In other words, any member of any labor union that participated in the Seattle WTO protests could be labeled a "terrorist" merely based on the union's presence there and â€” under Lautenberg's S 1237 â€” he or she could be forcibly disarmed forever. But the reality is far more chilling: given the criteria of disruptiveness, the participants in any effective strike or job action can now be subjugated as "terrorists." And given the Third Reich cloak of secrecy that now hides all U.S. security matters from judicial scrutiny, such subjugation could never be appealed. Indeed it is conceivable a labor activist (or any other opponent of the status quo) could be disappeared forever into the gulag of Guantanamo merely on the basis of the spurious argument that the (denied) attempt to purchase a firearm is absolute proof of "enemy combatant" intent. The law that would enable such outrages should more properly be labeled the Lautenberg/Bush/Alberto Gonzales Bill of Rights Nullification Act of 2007 because it would not only subject all future U.S. firearms ownership to the tyrannical whims of the modern-day incarnation of the dread Reich Security Service (RSHA), but it would but it would repeal the presumption of innocence that is the great wellspring of the American legal system. Thus, with active Democratic party collaboration, at the very least the Bush Regime is laying the groundwork to forcibly disarm every labor activist in the United States â€” and anyone else it chooses to put on its (secret) enemies list. Thus too another advance for the modern-day variant of fascism â€” not marching forward on hobnailed jackboots but sneaking past us on politically correct rubber soles. Note also how McCarthy's HR 297 undeniably anticipates enactment of S 1237: "The Secretary of Homeland Security shall make available to the Attorney General...records, updated not less than quarterly, which are relevant to a determination of whether a person is disqualified from possessing or receiving a firearm..."(Sec. 101:b.1.A). Now the relationship between the two measures comes into sharp focus: Lautenberg abolishes the presumption of innocence and grants the government the unprecedented power to rule on our political reliability while McCarthy provides the infrastructure to make sure the secret police get every possible scrap of information. Suddenly I wonder if closing the alleged "mental health loophole" â€” though no doubt an egregious blow to our freedom â€” isn't maybe just another red herring to distract us from the genuinely fatal wound that would be dealt our liberty by Lautenberg's coup-de-grace against due process. ********* Predictions past and future: as some of you may remember, before I was booted off Progressive Independent for speaking tactless truth to tacky tyranny, I predicted that the Democrats would take back Congress in 2006, would founder pathetically in their efforts to accomplish any meaningful socioeconomic change, and would then cut a win-win deal with the Bush Regime to impose forcible disarmament and further subvert the Bill of Rights in general, thereby enabling each side to claim accomplishments dearest to its ideologues' alleged hearts. Though the onslaught is not developing exactly the way I imagined it would, there is no doubt such an offensive is underway. But just as I foresaw the betrayal of our electoral hopes for Medicare reform and the restoration of labor rights, I can no longer doubt this new Democrat/Republican collaboration to abolish the presumption of innocence and grant the Homeland Security apparatus the ultimate power of approval or disapproval over all individual civilian firearms purchases is (A) the beginning of the final assault on the Constitution by representatives of the corporate ruling class and (B) the beginning of a Bush Regime effort to co-opt public reaction to the Virginia Tech massacre and thus rehabilitate its public image by launching its own forcible disarmament campaign â€” not out of the craven hoplophobia that so agitates the Democrats and alienates so many voters, but in the name of the same self-proclaimed robust patriotism that seduced us into cheering the (failed) conquest of Iraq. I can hear it now: "if y'all love your country, you'll give us the common-sense power to determine who's politically reliable enough to have a gun." The last time the politicians said something like that, the language was German. ********* NOTES: The text of HR 297 and the unfolding details of S 1237 are available through the excellent and superbly useful Thomas legislative search engine: http://thomas.loc.gov/ I am posting this same essay on my blog, Wolfgang von Skeptik, http://wolfgangvonskeptik.mu.nu/ -- Original Source: http://www.midwest-populistamerica.com/articles/threats-to-civil-liberties-arising-from-virginia-tech/ Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5.
Police identify Norris Hall shooter as Va. Tech student
Cho attended Northern Va. high school, peers describe him as 'loner' Maria Tchijov and Thomas Madrecki, Cavalier Daily Senior Writers BLACKSBURG, Va. -- Police identified Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old Virginia Tech student, as the gunman responsible for killing 30 victims Monday in Virginia Tech's Norris Hall. Some who knew him described Cho as "a complete loner" and the author of "disturbing" and "excessively violent" plays. Cho was found dead among the carnage that spanned four rooms and a nearby stairwell in Norris Hall. Cho, a native of South Korea, was linked to the murder weapon through a fingerprint contained in immigration documents. Ballistics tests confirmed that one of the two guns found at Norris Hall was also used at the shooting that took place two hours earlier in West Ambler Johnston dormitory. While police said it is likely that the two shootings are related, the investigation is ongoing. An ongoing investigation Cho was an English major at the university from Centreville, Va. Peers from Cho's middle school in Centreville said he was quiet, shy and withdrawn. "He was made fun of a lot by everybody," said Samuel Linton, a homeroom classmate of Cho's during seventh and eighth grade. "He was a complete loner, he never said a word ... he had no interaction with teachers -- he just stared like he wasn't paying attention." David Gearheart, who also attended middle school with Cho, said he talked to Cho once or twice, but that talking to him was just that -- talking to somebody rather than with somebody. "He had a lot of crazy writings in his notebook and stuff, how he hated Americans," Gearheart said. Linton said Cho was once reported to the principal for writing down the names of people he was supposedly planning to kill. "It was like a hit list," Linton said. "They found one in his locker." Linton said people "constantly" talked about how Cho might be the type of person that would one day attempt to kill someone. Officials at a press conference yesterday said they could not comment on allegations that Cho had a previous run-in with law enforcement officers in Blacksburg in 2005. Authorities executed a search warrant yesterday of Cho's dorm room in Harper Hall and removed mostly documentary evidence, including his writings that were widely characterized as violent by peers and professors. Stephanie Derry, a senior English student at Virginia Tech, said she knew Cho from a playwriting class. Derry described Cho's plays as "disturbing," but said nobody in the class took them as entirely serious. "The plays were excessively violent," Derry said. "But you can't really assume that everything written is true or is going to be true." The Associated Press reported that officials recovered a note in Cho's dorm that lambasted "rich kids," "debauchery" and "deceitful charlatans." Virginia State Police Superintendent Steve Flaherty said, however, there is no evidence of a suicide note. Flaherty also announced that the handguns used by Cho in the massacre were purchased in accordance with Virginia law in March. Police have not yet determined whether Cho had an accomplice in the shootings. Officials indicated that a person of interest from the first shooting is cooperating with police. That individual was an acquaintance of the female victim of the first shooting and was stopped by police and questioned by authorities at the time of the second shooting. As of press time, this individual was still considered a "person of interest." Officials respond Gov. Tim Kaine extended his condolences to the Virginia Tech community during a televised broadcast last night. "Our hearts go out to the entire community, Kaine said. "This is the darkest day in the wonderful history of Virginia Tech." Kaine also said he will commission an independent panel of law enforcement experts in the next 48 hours to examine the administration and law enforcement response to the events leading up to and immediately following Monday morning's shootings. The purview of this examination will include complaints about the university administration's delay in notifying students of danger immediately after the first shooting. That decision has been questioned publicly by some students and members of the media. Kaine did not answer questions regarding policy changes. "Before we talk about any policy changes we have to get our best assessment of what occurred," Kaine said. Kaine added that families of the victims were the number one priority. "This is not a crusade or something for a political campaign," Kaine said. "It's about comforting families ... and helping this community heal ... For those who want to make this into some kind of crusade I say take that elsewhere." Officials said yesterday they are not releasing the names of the victims until they have identified all the remains and notified the next of kin. Several media sources, including the student newspaper at Tech, have released preliminary lists of the victims' names. Virginia Tech president Charles Steger said Virginia Tech will cancel classes for the remainder of the week. Further announcements about classes were expected today. Norris Hall will remain closed for the rest of the school year. "As you can understand, we are still working to understand this terrible tragedy," Steger said. "It is very difficult for me to express how we feel." -- Alex Sellinger and Stephanie Kassab contributed to this article -- Original Source: The Cavalier Daily - April 18, 2007
Thoughts About Media Coverage of the Virginia Tech Tragedy
posted 5.01.07 Otto Wahl, Ph.D., University of Hartford The tragic death of 33 students at Virginia Tech has shocked and saddened us all. Given the mental health aspects of the situation, it is not surprising that there has been much in the coverage about mental illnesses and their treatment. Unfortunately, the articles and editorials that followed the shootings have often been troubling in what they convey to the public about mental illnesses and mental health interventions. One troubling aspect of the media coverage has been the frequent vilification and dehumanization of the troubled young man who perpetrated the killings. Appropriately sympathetic descriptions of the background and lives of the "32" victims were widespread, and such descriptions helped us to better appreciate the tragedy on a more personal level. However, descriptions of the 33rd person who died in the tragedy, Cho Seung-Hui, focused almost exclusively on his pathology, his anger, and his menacing manner. Some media sources characterized Cho as motivated by "meanness;" others labeled him as a "fiend," a "psychopath," or "just plain "evil." Such coverage ignored the fact that Cho's deathâ€”and much of his lifeâ€”was also a tragedy. His alienation, isolation, anger, and ultimate suicide are probably not the life goals he set out for himself. Much of the media coverage did discuss Cho's mental health, but mostly without notable empathy for his difficulties. Related is the mistaken implication in coverage of Cho's actions that mental illness and violence are synonymous. The widespread images of Cho brandishing weapons epitomized the already prevalent public image of the "menacing madman," and that image was underscored further by the fear-inducing labels Cho was given in many media accounts, such as "maniac" and "psycho" and worse. Likewise, the repeated discussions of the need to protect the college communityâ€”and the larger communityâ€”from such individuals served to reinforce unwarranted public fears of people with mental illnesses. The vast majority of people with mental illnesses, including severe mental illnesses, are neither violent nor criminal. The vast majority of students on campus who are living with mental illnesses are not threatening others, but working and studying to make better lives for themselves. I saw little discussion of this in media coverage. The events at Virginia Tech were truly horrendous. The media, like the public, searched to make sense of the tragedy and to find clues as to how future tragedies could be prevented. However, there was a tendency to focus on mental illness as the sole or primary explanation for the horrific outcome at Virginia Tech. Many reporters and even mental health professionals seemed to commit what social scientists have dubbed the "fundamental attribution error." This term refers to our tendency to attribute the actions of others, particularly unacceptable actions, to their inner, psychological attributes and to neglect potential situational influences. If we succumb to this error and focus mainly on the possible internal causes of behavior, the mental health of Cho Seung-Hui in this case, we may overlook other potential contributors to the event and, thus, other potential and important avenues for prevention. Often overlooked, then, were questions about how we engage or do not engage students on our college campuses or how we do or do not integrate diverse students to better create a sense of community, questions about what gaps in understanding and education about cultural differences might have contributed to Cho's apparent isolation and to the ultimate outcome, and questions about the extent to which stigma and negative attitudes about mental health problems could have contributed to Cho's apparent reluctance to accept counseling assistance despite the recommendations of Virginia Tech faculty. Instead of looking at the factors above, many media reports impliedâ€”directly or indirectlyâ€”that the major preventive solution is the lessening of restrictions on involuntary hospitalization. After horrific events like the Virginia Tech deaths, it is easy to forget that the current criteria for involuntary psychiatric commitment result from a long history of indiscriminate and abusive use of forced hospitalization and from a belated recognition that the individual civil rights of people with mental illnesses need protection. Just as the tragic events of 9/11 should not have allowed us to dismantle the basic civil liberties on which our country is founded, a tragic event like Virginia Tech should not serve as justification for diminishing the hard won civil protections of the millions of people with mental illnesses. But it may, and some of the news coverage is suggesting that it should. Also, it is not clear that involuntary commitment for Cho would have been the appropriate solution. Coerced treatment may have poorer long term outcomes than voluntary treatment if it creates trauma and fuels antagonism and poorer treatment compliance. For a person like Cho, who already felt persecuted and angry, this may have been likely. So hospitalization might have only postponed the tragic outcome. Outpatient treatment may have had a better chance of succeeding in helping Cho and preventing the lethal outcome. In hindsight, we know it was not successful, but we do not know that involuntary hospitalization would have had more success. The events at Virginia Tech have led to calls for greater security on campuses and for a better ability of campus authorities to exclude people with serious mental illnesses from the campus. Again, this represents a troubling inclination to further restrict the rights and opportunities of people living with mental illnesses. Easier hospitalization and campus restrictions are not what is needed for preventing tragedies such as the one at Virginia Tech. Instead, we need better training of service providers to deal with individuals who are reluctant to accept treatment, and therapeutic alternatives that are more attractive, less aversive, and better funded. We also need reduced stigma for seeking and accepting treatment, along with greater outreach and prevention efforts. I do not mean to suggest that there was no sensitive and appropriate media coverage of the events. Many stories were sympathetic to the needs of troubled youth on campuses, urging improvements and cautioning against attempts to exclude students. Former Rosalynn Carter Journalism Fellow, John Head, for example, wrote, in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, "A policy that punishes students for enduring emotional and mental disturbances will only discourage them from seeking help." Articles and editorials have called for expanded suicide prevention programs and improvements in culturally competent services, as well. An article in the Washington Post, by another former Carter Fellow, Shankar Vedantam looked "beyond the shooter," to consider social factors that may have contributed to the fatal outcome. And there did emerge a number a number of pieces that looked more fully and sympathetically at the life of Cho Seung-Hui and at his family's pain and suffering. Media coverage also brought to light the archaic and offensive language of the federal statutes for regulation of gun purchases. I am referring to the prohibition against selling guns to "mental defectives,' a category which, for the federal government, apparently includes persons with mental illnesses. I am amazed that such a reference to mental illnessâ€”language that was discarded decades ago because of its pejorative nature and its connection to eugenics and Nazi cleansingâ€”could still be the chosen terminology in the laws of our country.I can only hope that the wide exposure of this language in the press may lead to sufficient embarrassment and/or outrage as to generate an appropriate updating. I am, however, cautiously optimistic. Despite the great deal of stigmatizing coverage that has surrounded the tragic loss of life at Virginia Tech, the discussions that are occurring have the potential to generate important changes. Chief among these are greater understanding of and improved responsiveness to mental health needs on campuses. I do not mean to suggest, as some media coverage has, that these are needed primarily to protect the student body from unstable shooters, but rather that they are needed so that universities can enhance their abilities to support the learning and accomplishment of all students, including the many who experience mental health problems. -- Archived with permission of the author. Original Source: MIWatch.org http://www.miwatch.org/Wahl.htm
By Ari Rabkin Apr 26 2007 Between the Lines One of the striking facts about the Virginia Tech shootings was how predictable the murderer's identity was. The authorities knew long before his rampage that Cho Seung-Hui was not merely "troubled," but dangerous. A court had ruled two years previously that he posed an "imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness." As a result, he was civilly committed to an outpatient mental-health clinic. He checked out the next day, however, without being effectively treated. In the wake of the shootings, many commentators have decried the gradual decline in involuntary commitment to mental health facilities. The courts, so the thinking goes, should have been more aggressive, and should have committed Cho to an inpatient facility, and not released him until he was judged to be no longer dangerous. But this sort of confinement poses awkward questions. The mentally ill are confined â€” locked up â€” not because they have done anything wrong, but because they might be dangerous in the future. Sun Podcast: A podcast is available for this column. Click here to listen to or to download it.Sun Podcast: A podcast is available for this column. Click here to listen to or to download it.To lock people up, not because they are criminals, but because they are dangerous, subverts many of our normal notions of due process. To go free, a criminal defendant needs to rebut a factual allegation; he needs to show that he didn't commit a particular act. A prisoner confined for being dangerous, however, is in a much more precarious position. "Danger" cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury of laymen, but can only be assessed by expert judgment. To avoid making such judgments, American civil law does not have a general category of "dangerous persons" other than the mentally ill. Sane individuals can normally be imprisoned only after a criminal conviction, for a crime they have already committed. Civil confinement, as it is called, is restricted to those judged to be "mentally abnormal." This category, in addition to violent psychotics and the like, includes repeat sex offenders, a group that society has become increasingly eager to keep off the streets. Many states now allow the government to confine serious sex offenders even after they have served their criminal sentence. Proponents of such "civil confinement" laws argue that these individuals have so strong a compulsion to sexually abuse others that it would be dangerous to release them, and that so long as they are a menace, they should be confined. Enemy prisoners in wartime are yet another class of prisoners, held not as criminals, but as menaces. Unlike the mentally ill, they are held outside of the ordinary legal system entirely. The United States is currently holding hundreds of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and many others at detention sites in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. These detainees are not criminals, and often can be charged with no crimes, since American civilian courts do not have jurisdiction over acts committed by foreign nationals outside the United States. Altering the law to cover such cases is an unattractive option. Scooping up foreigners, and trying them before American civilian courts, for acts that were legal when and where they were committed, is a precedent that the government is rightly loathe to set. Non-judicial detention is absolutely necessary. School shootings and suicide bombings have this in common: the perpetrators do not expect to survive, are prepared to go to great lengths to kill others and cannot be deterred. The normal criminal justice system is not designed or equipped to stop such acts. Stopping such acts requires preemptive confinement. But on what terms should so extraordinary a confinement be imposed? There is a striking parallelism between the military's procedures for detaining enemy combatants, and our civil responses to mental illness. These parallels may help us understand each case by reference to the other. In many states, the mentally ill can be confined after an administrative hearing, with no jury. The standard of proof is generally "clear and convincing evidence," not the proof beyond a reasonable doubt required for criminal conviction. Likewise, terror detainees are evaluated by military review boards, not civil juries. The standard of proof required to hold prisoners at Guantanamo is not precisely defined, but prisoners are routinely released as "no longer dangerous." Locking people away and forgetting them is, of course, abhorrent, and both the mentally ill and terror detainees, are reevaluated on a yearly or bi-yearly basis. Preemptive confinement, while necessary, must not be overused, and the courts have created a number of limitations on its use domestically. Only the "mentally abnormal" may be confined, and only if they pose a substantial risk. Similarly, detention in wartime is constrained by the scope of the war. The prisoners held at Guantanamo are in our custody either because a government with jurisdiction over them turned them over, or because they were seized in an area of active combat operations. The U.S. does not have a general legal right to take prisoners from the soil of the United States or friendly powers. The procedures appropriate for the mentally abnormal are obviously different from those suitable for handling enemy combatants in wartime. The threats posed by the two groups and our legal obligations to each are very different. In both cases, though, the normal mechanisms of reactive justice are insufficient, and society has a compelling interest in confining them, not as punishment, but as prevention. Likewise in both cases, we must balance the risk posed by a dangerous individual versus the rights of that individual, and the risk of confining the innocent. There is no guarantee that a court would have found Cho to be "abnormal," or that harmless individuals will not be confined. Consequently, we owe ourselves, and our prisoners, a clear account as to when this sort of confinement is appropriate, and what standards of proof apply. We owe it to society to do our utmost to protect the innocent from those who, either from illness or malice, would do them harm. Ari Rabkin is a graduate student in Computer Science. He can be contacted at asr32Â­@Â­cÂ­oÂ­rÂ­nÂ­ell.edu. Between the Lines appears Thursdays. -- Original Source: Cornell Daily Sun - April 26, 2007
Jonny Lieberman <jdl46@cornell.edu>, <lieberman.jonny@gmail.com>
By Jeremy Siegman Apr 27 2007 Cosmology on the Rocks It always feels weird swallowing real-world events like the Virginia Tech massacre in the hazy cosmopolitanism of Uris Library. Cornell and its libraries, after all, are fleeing from the bustling Manhattans, from the culture of CNN and even the busy humming of our own town. It feels like fleeing from all that is extremist, religious or vulgar. And the Promised Land is the Hill, which, legend has it, is populated by a super-strong Atlas who can not only pick up the planet, but also stop it from warming too, and just foster utopia in general, all at the reasonable rate of only $40,000 a year (tax-free if you use Big Red Bucks!). This detached cosmopolitan Cornell is proud, richly endowed, but can be shaken. When an English major murders 32 people at a university, our university shakes. Finally, something has hit home; but utopianism hits back. Our president responds in the eloquent universalism we know best: "We are one; one community, one people, one planet." This is me responding, stuck in Uris Library because it's raining outside; I'm stuck, too, in this Skortonian universalism, as I consider the murderer, his condition and ours too. "Three Pro-Gun Bills Pending in Nevada Legislature!" exclaims a headline from NRA.org. You should press your senators to pass them, urges this National Rifle Association writer, so people can have the freedom to not register their handguns! Gun activists argue that Cho Seung-Hui should have been lawfully prevented from buying his .22-caliber and 9mm guns because of his mental illness. They also argue that gun-control laws should be toned down! This is utterly strange, this exaltation of the Second Amendment at a time like this. Considered in a vacuum, there's really nothing wrong with the right to bear arms. But when the bald eagle of America is made to hold rifles in its talons (the NRA logo) â€” a powerful symbol is crafted. It speaks loudly for a lot of Americans. The symbolic exaltation is poor form, with poor results: the nation that made Terminator I-III, Rambo, Quentin Tarantino and Cho too. Tarantino is not Cho â€” a talented artist, not a murderer. He doesn't shoot, he makes aesthetics. But what is his aesthetic? It is images of Cho and for Cho. Aesthetics broadcast culture, and culture affects people. What Cho most needed was probably medication. But what he needed second most was a culture that says, "don't shoot." This he did not quite have; rather, he had Kill Bill. And he had a precedent of almost 20 school shootings in America in the past 10 years. Add this to the list of things in which we lead the world; Germany is a not-so-close second, with only three. We have a cult of violence in this country. We also have a cult of hyper-individualism: the kind that cherishes individual rights like not having to register your gun. Violence could exist without this cult and so could mental illness; but I merely suggest some cultural change wouldn't be a bad thing. Diversity within Cornell works because the lack of religious and ethnic unity is compensated for: the minute you get here you are hit over the head with Freshman Orientation. You are explicitly told, that despite the diverse backgrounds and different colors â€” we are all friends. You are showered with programs and people your age, with your interests, your intelligence ... But diversity in the real America is ugly at times â€” the same diversity is extant, but there's no Freshman Orientation. There's no one really saying we are all friends. (In fact, we compete with out neighbors for almost everything.) We lack, then, a common language with which to tell the school shooters, "don't shoot." The American suicide murderer has no cause â€” unlike those who blew up themselves and 191 Iraqis in Baghdad just days after Virginia Tech. But perhaps what an American rebel with no cause needs is ... a cause. And a peaceful one to boot. In America, everyone has a different moral code â€” from the Bible to Gandhi to Oprah. The only normative force we share is our secular law: don't shoot because you'll go to jail. But Americans feel oppositional towards the law anyway: the under-21 collegiate "elite" could proudly drink most baby boomers under the table. The law is not enough. If there's anything that could work it might be Christianity; but America is no longer Christian. So why not just let each denomination speak its piece? A chorus of don't shoots in different languages and moralities? We already have this multiplicity, and Cho falls through the cracks. To add to our diversity, we a need language more common, so widely held that it can be strong enough to speak to the next Cho. If Americans are so different, it's only knowledge of each other that will bring that commonality. It's a university, or at least a good high school, that will bring that knowledge. It's getting everyone, even the poor, into those schools ... Consider, then, our Cornellian cosmopolitanism â€” "We are one; one community, one people, one planet" â€” turning around with the Hokies and the citizenry and facing reality, facing Cho, facing his Columbine counterparts Dylan and Eric. Consider gathering the psychological knowledge of their sickness, the practical knowledge of how to make society safe and the moral knowledge that murder is wrong. Consider gathering all this and broadcasting it mercilessly on TV, alongside images of eagles with no rifles in their talons. This might take a really long time â€” culture does â€” and there will always be psychological violence. But if the relative peace of this campus on a Hill is any paradigm, then let's take the reigns of the real world. Let's be powerful the way we know how. Let's create some ideology, disseminate it and brainwash everyone. If we're good enough at it, we'll even reach the next Cho: mental illness could resist even a culture of peace, but it'd be quite a bit harder. Yes, we'll pick up where the sixties left off: we'll brainwash them into thinking we are all one. Maybe, in fact, we are. Jeremy Siegman is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at jas367@cornell.edu. Cosmology on the Rocks appears alternate Fridays. -- Original Source:Cornell Daily Sun - April 27, 2007
May 22, 2007 By Darren Franich Suicide is so much less embarrassing than homicide. Can you imagine the shitstorm maelstrom that would engulf our pretty campus if someone shot five people? Shot them so their blood splattered across the tables of Stern dining hall. Or their blood covered the pull-out desks in the chem building. Or their blood filled the fountains until the water sprayed dark bitter red. Five Stanford students dead. Hell, it doesn't have to be five. Make it three. Make it one. Think of the black cloud that would descend on our lives. Our own little Virginia Tech. The blood, damn it, the fucking blood! Pouring out of open wounds. Choked out of lungs that will never breathe again. On our campus. On our hands. Flowing out of pale bodies until the heart just stops pumping, tired, empty. Fortunately, people don't kill other people at Stanford. They just kill themselves. No one ever talks about the suicides, but everyone talks about how no one ever talks about the suicides. "Can you believe," we shake our heads, "four suicides at Stanford in one year, and nobody notices, nobody cares." Someone says, "I heard there were five." "That's what I'm talking about." Stanford is killing people. We shouldn't hold that against Stanford. There is so much joy here. There are thousands of students who live happy lives of quiet desperation, for whom suicide is never more than a passing fancy, the dream of an eternal vacation from one's own brain. But for a school that prides itself on its happiest-place-on-earth reputation, one suicide is a misfortune. Five is just awkward. To a high school senior, Stanford is the anti-Cornell: happy people living happy lives under the happy, happy sun. And now there is a suicide epidemic. Intelligent young people â€” who have worked hard their whole lives to get here, who have so much to look forward to â€” are eliminating themselves from the humanity continuum. Asphyxiation. It's not a good way to go. These people would have been great. Leaders of the world. And now they are memories tinged in eternal sadness. Take them off of Facebook. Cross them off your Christmas list. Destiny has clipped whatever wings they might have grown. Some people have expressed distaste for the University's handling of the suicides. A couple weeks ago, Hennessy wrote a letter to the editor. (In case you missed it, Boardman emailed you a link a few days later.) Half of the letter was about Virginia Tech. That event was a tragedy beyond all reckoning. But it has nothing to do with Stanford. Campus security is not the issue we should be debating. I saw eight police cars in twenty minutes last Saturday, and witnessed one brave officer fearlessly charging a dangerous minor for drinking quietly in public. A libertarian might argue that the overregulation on this campus is the problem. I will just point out that no one is killing us except ourselves. They're trying they're best, though, like bumbling parents desperately devoted to children they will never understand. They designed a cute Campus Climate Questionnaire with a stress tree and a stress quilt. They had a mental health fun day in White Plaza, with free massages. Everywhere you look there's a pamphlet for the Bridge. It's all utterly useless, but they're trying. It's the thought that counts, even if they appear to think we're in second grade. Our school's not to blame. It's us. It's who we are. It's the curse of our overworked generation. If you're here, then odds are you've spent the better half of your life attaining perfection. Extracurriculars, AP tests, trophies, student government, student newspapers, singing, dancing, studying, sleeping only when your body could hold out no longer against the dark unconsciousness. I always assumed that sort of life was over with high school; that once you got to college things slowed down. For most people, college is even more intense than high school: more work, more coffee. Our parents used science to make us the perfect worker bee study bots â€” but you can't just turn that off. If anything, you become even more type-A with age. We want it all. We binge on work, we binge on play, we binge. But it's never enough. We get to Stanford, which is supposed to be the fulfillment of all our dreams, and it isn't enough. We need a good med school, a good law school, a great job, the love and respect of our peers and our betters. My shrink described to me how kids like us â€” perfectionists, go-getters, workaholics â€” live our lives walking up an eternal slope without ever turning back. We never see how high we've come, we only see how much higher we still have to go. And we get depressed because there is no plateau; the mountain just gets steeper. It doesn't help that the whole world is going to shit. Or rather, that we are more aware than any previous generation of how shitty the world has always been. It calls to mind something AJ said a couple of weeks ago on "The Sopranos." How can you not be depressed? How can any sane person approach the world with anything less than horror and distaste and loathing? When AJ attempted suicide on the most recent episode, I found myself begging the Lord to spare him â€” as if he carried the fate of us all on his shoulders, as if whatever happened to him was going to happen to us eventually. The pessimism is everywhere. The '90s are seven years gone. Any dream of paradise on earth is gone with them. The planes flew into the towers. And that didn't even matter. Can you imagine? 9/11 doesn't even matter. It's a blip in the radar. People were suffering before; people are still suffering. Our world is broken, dying. We killed it. Global warming is God's next flood. Wipe the slate clean. Maybe the cockroaches will do better. Or so we think, sometimes, when the sunshine feels cold, when death feels so close. You know what? There's a way out. And you don't need CAPS or the Bridge or the Office of Religious Life. You have to fail, and you have to want to fail. Skip a class, or miss a meeting. Whatever you think you have to do, do the exact opposite. Try to become everything you're afraid of becoming: fat, stupid, alone. Admit weakness. Find someone who makes you happy and tell them everything that makes you hurt. Especially the stupid shit. Because suicide, in the end, is stupid. Living is the appropriate response to life. We owe it to our honored dead to learn from their mistakes. We owe it to them to live every day like it's the start of forever. And we owe it to them to try to change our life if our life isn't working for us. Darren Franich will be celebrating his 21st and 22nd birthdays on Friday and insists that his devoted underage fan base come and get illegally plastered. Email him at dfranich@stanford.edu. Comments on this article: Cat - 5/22/07 Wow, great piece! Just finished the Campus Climate Questionaire and found it hokey. L - 5/22/07 Cute rhetoric but you aren't taking the whole situation into account. It isn't necessarily Stanford or our parents or our type-A personalities that are, as you say so many times, killing us -- there are innumerable nuances to these situations, including unglamorous non-Stanford-related roots like clinical depression. Also, for some crazy reason I find myself unable to trust the guy who begs god to spare AJ Soprano to genuinely have all of our best interests at heart... J - 5/22/07 Darren, if you truly want to help then go out and fail, fail big, and write a column about it. Help show how to redefine success. Otherwise this really is rhetoric, as empty as the trees and quilts in the campus questionnaire. Eric - 5/22/07 Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too on every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and the headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned softly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. Jason Kerwin - 5/22/07 This is exceptional writing. I've learned to expect far less from the Daily. L is right about the clinical depression angle. It's very common here, as on many college campuses. Most researchers think there is a direct link between depression and intelligence/creativity, so the high rates of depression here are no accident. David - 5/22/07 Darren's articles shouldn't have blogs after them because they just sap the energy out of what I always find to be exceptionally powerful and interesting writing. Next time I finish reading one of Darren's articles and I see that dreaded "comments on this article:" line, I'll stop, close my computer, think of the craziest and trite shit that I can to post, open my computer again, and sure enough, I'll find my work already done for me. s - 5/23/07 Just a quick note - The Bridge did not have anything to do with the corny Campus Climate survey. I wanted to kill myself 2 - 5/23/07 And it's not because of myself, I would have if I were able to do such thing. But it's because the way Stanford treats me every day (and especially the incompetence of student housing). So, since we're paying so much for health insurance anyway, they should include eutanasia for students. That way they wouldn't have to deal with usbickering after getting so much abuse from this university. Nicole D - 5/23/07 I think it's really easy to blame our parents or our high schools or our societies for making us into the "perfectionists, go-getters" and "workaholics" you seem to think everyone at Stanford is. It is my hope that students here are smart enough to transcend that bullshit and to realize for themselves that perpetually jumping through hoops will never yield lasting satisfaction. Instead of blindly climbing that slope your therapist so poetically described, we all need to completely reevaluate what we've been programmed by the afforementioned forces to think is important. We all need to ask ourselves whether the values we use to structure our lives are truly ours or not, whether they make us happy or not, whether the standards of achievment we had in high school are the ones we want cling to all our lives. It's a really uncomfortable thing to do, but it only this sort of continuous self-evaluation that can ensure that we're living the life we really want by standards we set for ourselves. This is where I think therapy comes in. I'm a huge therapy enthusiast. If I were president, i would mandate free therapy for everyone. My parents are both psychotherapists. Fuck, all my parents friends are therapists (I'm from Brooklyn, NY, okay)! I, myself, saw a therapist for a little over a year before I left for college when my boyfriend became clinically depressed and suicidal. I don't think therapy is a miracle cure, but it was certainly one of the best thing I've ever done. Not only did she help me deal with the stress of being in a relationship with someone who was depressed, but she also helped me rationally approach so many issues I had never even realized affected me so profoundly. I don't know if there's a stigma about seeking out mental help here at Stanford because, quite frankly, I've never really heard the subject discussed among students. I come from a family in which the offer to talk to a mental health professional about whatever I wanted has always been on the table, and I'm a firm believer that the majority of the American population needs to change its attitude towards mental health. I think it's important for people to approach their mental health in the same way they approach their physical health. You go for routine check-ups to make sure your body is working smoothly and get even small ailments checked out as a precautionary measure. People need to realize that chatting with a mental health professional regularly is not a diagnosis of insanity, but a normal and wonderful way to begin to straigten out the jumble of things that is in most of our heads. People need to understand that any issue, not matter how seemingly insignificant, is a legitimate reason to talk to someone. I say, if you can afford a private therapist, take advantage. If not, try out the Bridge Center or CAPS, Vaden's Counseling and Psychological Services. It's easy to demonize Stanford, or society, or the College Board and blame them for all of our problems. Ultimately, though, we are just as responsible for our own mental health as we are for our own lives. happy birthday and have fun getting shitfaced, nd -- Original Source: Stanford Daily - May 22, 2007
Permissions granted by James Hohmann Editor-in-Chief The Stanford Daily <jhohmann@stanford.edu>
Op-Ed: An open letter to President Hennessy
May 14, 2007 By Lisette Rimer Dear Dr. Hennessy, Thank you for your op-ed piece May 4th on preventing future tragedies such as Virginia Tech. It was forwarded to me byone of your students who suffered the loss of a friend, my son Patrick Wood. Patrick graduated from Stanford in 2005 with distinction in math. He loved the school, had many friends there, and was even treated for depression there. In January before he graduated, he was hospitalized for, as he explained to me, "having thoughts of suicide." He was committed to the Stanford hospital for five days, but proclaimed that he was OK, mostly bored, and didn't belong there. The psychiatrist in charge at the hospital agreed that Pat was OK and should be permitted to return to school as long as he continued therapy. He saw a therapist and a psychiatrist on campus and renewed his medication. His mood was up and down, but he continued an active social life and good communication with us. He was excited about an internship at Siemens in Berlin, Germany, which he began after graduation. He had applied for the internship through the Stanford Center in Berlin. He suspended his therapy for the summer with plans to return in September for the computer science co-term program, but he loved Berlin too much to leave just yet. Another friend from Stanford was arriving to work in the American Embassy there, and so Patrick obtained a leave of absence and continued to work at Siemens through the fall. All the while, he made many friends, spoke and wrote fluent German, went to concerts with colleagues at Siemens, and maintained close contact with the Stanford Center. He could often be heard playing the piano there just as he had done at Haus Mitt. He wrote about a "mini-depression" before he came home to Connecticut for Christmas vacation. We thought a medication refill would be the answer. His twin sister and older brother were home, along with cousins, aunts, and uncles. It was the usual busy but fun time. Pat later told friends it was "relaxing" and that it was good to get away from the city for a while. On December 27th, he went to New York City to see another good friend from Stanford. He returned to Berlin on the 28th. In January he wrote about a "mini-breakdown." We had many emails. I called, but could not contact him by telephone. His last email to me was on January 26th. Humboldt University had requested additional information on his application as a grad student there. He took it as rejection, told me he might be returning to Stanford, and asked me to wish him luck. He answered no more emails after that. He saw friends on the weekend of the 28th and 29th. He did not return phone calls after Tuesday the 31st. His friend, who worked at the American Embassy and who lived a block away, became worried. He called and went to Pat's apartment several times the following weekend. He called the Stanford Center on Monday morning. They called the police to break into the apartment. By that evening, the police found Pat. He had died of carbon monoxide poisoning on Tuesday, January 31st. Patrick was one of many graduates that June. He was one of many more who were going on to graduate school. The school cannot be responsible for every student on campus or every new graduate. I am under no illusions about who was responsible for his treatment and for what he did. It was Patrick alone who decided to stay in Germany, who decided to suspend treatment, and ultimately who decided that suicide would relieve his depression. I have tried to retrace his steps continuously in my mind ever since we were notified on February 6, 2006. On that day, his friend and others from the Stanford Center identified him. They called a Stanford residential housing director in Palo Alto, and he called us. Both the Stanford School in Berlin and Palo Alto had memorial services for him in February and March of last year. As you can see, the school was very much involved in both the life and in the death of my son. Please do not mistake my comments for blame. Maybe no one could have prevented his loss, but I have learned that it is the very nature of his disease, and of Cho's at Virginia Tech, that should cause us to be hyper-vigilant. Students who are depressed, even brilliant and loving students like Pat, cannot function reliably because the source of their decision-making process is under attack. They are making flawed decisions because the very same mechanism used to make these decisions is malfunctioning. There is an anatomical difference between a healthy brain and a depressed brain. It is a detectable, visible difference, and yet it is only a part of the brain, for many decisions appear "normal." It is those normalities which lulled me into thinking that Pat would get help, that he would take care of himself, that he would certainly see how magnificent he was, that he had just graduated from Stanford with a 3.9 average and a major in math, that his friends loved him, that he had had the best childhood we could provide, that he had the brightest future of anyone. How could he not be happy? The answer is because depression does not operate on the same assumptions. I have had to change my own notions of well-being because they failed Pat. He did not get help in Germany because he could not. The decisions he needed to make were not possible with the oppression and pain he was feeling. Although he was physically able to get to a doctor or call a therapist, just as he had done at Stanford, those functions needed motivation, and it was his motivation which had been destroyed. All the drive, the talent, the brilliance that had won him a full scholarship to Pomfret School, that had gotten him perfect SAT's, that had made him a valedictorian, that had made him a merit scholar, that had gotten him into Stanford, that won him a scholarship there, that had gotten him into the Krupp Internship program in Germany and then into Siemensâ€”all the motivation he needed to achieve academic and social success was no match for this disease. He had sought treatment, and it had not worked, so he turned inward until he isolated his thoughts, his wants, and his pain, until he was feeling nothing but the sense of control which suicide brings. I think your comments about psychological services are a welcome response. Pat's life was saved the first time he had major depression and was hospitalized by one of the counselors on campus, and I am deeply grateful. But I would hope, in the wake of Pat's agonizing loss and the frightening possibility of another Virginia Tech, that we come away with a few additional realizations. I have spent every day trying to do the same thing. Mainly I hope that we understand that suicide victims are not insane. They function as well as they need to function. Almost everything about Pat was normal on the outside, even the relationship problem that preceded his death. A truth I have learned too late is that we have to go to them. Pat needed someone to take him for help. Just because he did it the first time didn't mean he would do it again. As a matter of fact, there was less chance he would get help because he was weakened from the first depressive episode. Because I have learned that depression is a terminal illness, I would hope that we could change the meaning of the term from a saddened state of mind, to the dangerous, insidious threat that it is. Most people who commit suicide have been depressed and have attempted it beforehand. As I think Patrick and the Virginia Tech incident made abundantly clear, we are ill-equipped to detect the severity of the disease and, therefore, the likelihood that these victims will complete a suicide. Anatomical detection would give us empirical data that we need to make a more accurate diagnosis, certainly more accurate than relying on a patient to rate himself on a depression scale as is now commonly the case. How many other diseases have to be self-diagnosed when a patient is least able? And finally, a thought about treatment. A newspaper article last year pointed out that patients who were "cured" had to endure an average of four combinations of medication and therapy before finding one that succeeded. That means a great deal of trial and error at a time when any failure can be misconstrued as a reason for hopelessness and self-harm. The implications for a university are complex. How much do you reach out, especially if the patient does not seek treatment? How do you know the severity of the depression? If we are relying on averagely intelligent people to pick up on the cues, we will never succeed. I know because I am one of those failures. I will hate myself forever for what I did not know about depression, for what I missed, for what I did not do for my son, but I also know that there are a lot of people saying the same thing about Cho. They are all blaming themselves, just as I am, because what passes for non-threatening behavior before suicide becomes pockmarked with danger signs afterward. I should have gone to Berlin. I should have called his friends. I should have done a lot of things and so should they who knew Cho. But we don't because we don't know they are necessary. We don't know they mean life or death, and we will not know until we have reliable detection. Maybe the lesson that arises from Patrick, a favorite son of Stanford, is that students within Stanford programs should be better monitored no matter where they are. Whether they are in Palo Alto or Germany, follow-up and care (and this is most important) should be initiated by the school. Why? Because seriously depressed students are less likely to seek treatment. They consider themselves to be defective instead of legitimately sick because that's what depression does. It convinces them that there is no hope, and therefore no cure, but that is really depression talking. We have to break through that. We have to go to them, physically and mentally. If you go to the website for The American Federation for Suicide Prevention, you will see their advice for preventing suicide. The suicidal person cannot be expected to independently seek treatment. Somebody must take them. If we can come away with any insight from Patrick and Cho, it is that follow-up was woefully lacking. I shudder to mention their names in the same sentence, but similar questions in their aftermaths compel me. Why didn't the school follow up on Pat's treatment in Germany even though he was in a Stanford internship program? The answer: Stanford was relying on Pat, and so was I. That cannot continue. When students become patients, the school must monitor them as long as they are connected to the school and wherever they are connected. Depressed students â€” even the best, like Pat â€” are simply not capable. Depressed students don't seek treatment because they are, not surprisingly, depressed. This is how depression kills, and in the process, it robs functioning until there is very little on which to rely. How do we know when that functioning is gone? We don't, and that is why it is up to us to know more. It is simply in our own best interest to detect and treat more actively and accurately. If I have come away with anything from the loss of my beautiful son it is this: Depression will kill anybody, but the burden is on usto know whom. When Pat graduated in 2005, our whole family came to Stanford to wish him well: my husband and I from Connecticut, his older brother Colin and Colin's friend Julie from Washington State, his twin sister Libby from Vermont, and his grandparents Dr and Mrs. David Rimer from Los Angeles. We all came to congratulate him, and we were impressed with the beautiful ceremonies and meaningful events, but as I read your op-ed piece, the memory of meeting you at graduation stood out the most. You seemed like a caring person, even during the brief moments in which we had our photograph taken with you. We commented afterward how welcoming you and your wife had been, even though you were probably exhausted from shaking hands and posing for several hours. And now I write to ask you to bring that caring sensibility to the forefront of this issue. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for college students. It weakens parents' confidence in the safety of their children on campus â€” parents, who, by the way, are already feeling excluded from the well-beings of their children because of confidentiality. We cannot see grades, get psychiatric records, get tuition bills directly, or intervene on students' behalf. Everything is left up to the student, and, as we have seen with Patrick and Cho, we risk too much isolation. Again, thank you for your interest in this issue, and thank you for promoting the psychological well-being of your students. I appreciate your focusing Stanford's public attention on these avoidable catastrophes. Patrick loved Stanford dearly. He was grateful for the services you did provide, and now, in his stead, we are grateful for your continuing efforts to protect our children. I invite you to visit the memorial blog set up for Patrick by his Stanford friends at: http://patrickwood.blogspot.com/ Sincerely, Lisette Rimer, Pat's mom Pomfret Center, Connnecticut Comment on this article Jon Bell - 5/14/07 Ten day ago, a newly-admitted Freshman to Stanford went on yet another in a long-time-series of verbal abuse tirades against all the people who loved her; wished that they were all dead; that she hated all people, especially the rich--and that after Stanford she wanted a career in public relations. This person is now getting help--if she allows it. The University has been informed and has been fabulous. Ted Rudow III,MA - 5/14/07 There is no reason to doubt the generous impulse behind the work of professional psychologists and social scientists. Most of the experts who guide the psychological society have good intentions. But there may be reasons to doubt the competence of psychological helpers. A willingness to help does not guarantee a helpful result. Sometimes, as Thoreau wryly observed, the result is the opposite: "If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life." The fact that psychologists are trying to help people often keeps us from asking whether they know how to help. We think it's bad manners to ask a man who is trying to help us if he really knows what he's doing. Of course, it's not just manners that prevent us from questioning psychology. It's also faith--the kind of faith that makes us believe that school teachers are doing what is best for our children. Or the kind of faith that tells you that the man in the clerical collar won't knock you down and steal your wallet. Just the same, we ought to be asking if psychologists really do know how to help. A good deal of research suggests that psychology is ineffective. And there is evidence pointing to the conclusion that psychology is actually harmful. The first indication that psychology might be ineffective came in 1952 when Hans Eysenck of the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London, discovered that neurotic people who do not receive therapy are as likely to recover as those who do. Psychotherapy, he found, was not any more effective than the simple passage of time. Additional studies by other researchers showed similar results. Then Dr. Eugene Levitt of the Indiana University School of Medicine found that disturbed children who were not treated recovered at the same rate as disturbed children who were. A further indication of the problem was revealed in the results of the extensive Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study. The researchers found that uncounseled juvenile delinquents had a lower rate of further trouble than counseled ones. Other studies have shown that untrained lay people do as well as psychiatrists or clinical psychologists in treating patients. And the Rosenham studies indicated that mental hospital staff could not even tell normal people from genuinely disturbed ones. It is possible to go on with the list. It is quite a long one. But I hope this is sufficient to make the point that when psychologists rush in to help, they are not particularly successful. Ted Rudow III, Scientologist - 5/14/07 Hey Ted, what exactly do you mean by, "psychology is actually harmful." That's a pretty nice blanket statement there. What you're meaning to say is, clinical psychology isn't always effective. The studies you list aren't indictments of psychology as a discipline, but specific methods of treatment. And none of them conclude, "Therefore, nobody should trust any psychologists, because of what we have tried to show." Seriously. Neurosis is not as widespread or specific as depression. Psychotherapy was always hackery and has little to do with modern-day depression treatment methods. Children's developmental processes are also moot in this discussion, be they abnormal or normal or whatnot. There are lots of studies showing a lot of things. You have to look at the whole body of the discipline and then inform yourself, not take the good and pointed studies relating to specific areas and discount the entire field. Why did you even give her space? - 5/14/07 At some point, you just have to let go, lady. Get a grip. Stop projecting your woulda-coulda-shoulda parental replays to compensate for everything you didn't do, just to make yourself feel better and ignore what really did happen, most of which probably wouldn't have changed even with all the nannying you suggest. The Real BadgerNation - 5/14/07 I agree... and President Hannessy's fake smile and politically correct image are a clear sign that he cares. Same way G.W.'s visits to Iraq and shaking of those people's hands, taking pictures and putting up a big baboon smile show that he also cares... about sending America's sons to die. Why is this letter in the Daily? - 5/15/07 I agree with WDYEGHS - it's not very helpful to expect that CAPS could be able to 'follow-up' on GRADUATES (who aren't eligible for their services any more, anyway...*ahem*), not to mention when they are 9 time zones away. Aside from the logistical (think personnel, funding, time and money spent tracking down Stanford students abroad) impossibility of this operation, how would that be funded? A third of Stanford undergrads go to CAPS at some time in their career here - keeping tabs on them to follow up is just not feasible with the way the service is set up at the moment. Also, when would treatment end? If we were to promote a regime of following up on everybody after every psychological event had been resolved (something that closely resembles nannying...which health services can't do to people once they are of age without their consent) then it risks wasting the time of professionals who are already over-stretched and underpaid. Finally, CAPS psychologists are not permitted to practice in Germany because they are licensed in the state of California. This guy's story is really tragic and it makes me really sad to have read this piece, but the answer, if there was one, would not have lay at Stanford no matter what obligations the mother wants to impose on the university. A more sympathetic response... - 5/15/07 I think the three posts above me are not giving this well thought out article enough credit. I don't think she's advocating for a CAPS conselour to commute to Germany to make sure a graduate is doing ok, but some sort of follow up with the family or student to make sure they are getting some sort of help. Yes, a third of the student body may go to CAPS, but a much smaller fraction of the student body would require this follow up - - those who attempted suicide, were committed to the hospital against their will, etc. While this article does suggest that Stanford should have remained involved in Pat's mental rehabilitation, I think the more important thing to take away is the author's useful view into the life of a mentally depressed student, and hopefully raises awareness of what our peers are going through - peers who you see next to you at dinner, walk by in white plaza, sit next to in class. while pat did not take his life while at stanford, many others have, and that fact needs a lot more attention from ALL OF US at stanford. Alyssa O'Brien, PWR Instructor - 5/16/07 As a Stanford instructor who knew Pat as a student years ago in PWR "Comic Rhetoric," I am deeply saddened to hear of his death. My heart goes out to Lisette and to all Pat's friends and family members. I still remember his gentle smile and quick wit. I hope anyone reading this realizes that suicide is a lonely and terrible solution -- there are people who will grieve and miss you with a deep ache. May 17 is the first annual Stanford Wellness day. Make a pact on this day to reach out to others and not give in or give up. Grateful - 5/17/07 Thank you for sharing your painful and most personal experience. Your letter points out the difference between sadness and depression. Don't ever let go of your search for meaning and your determination to help others. Even if some miss the point (as evidenced by a few of the responses), to me and to others your words are precious. No man is an island. Thank you. Lisette Rimer - 5/20/07 Dear Mr. Hohmann, Thank you for being so generous with space in the Daily for Pat's picture and story. You gave prominence to an issue which has apparently troubled Stanford both on and off campus and, judging by the responses to Pat's story, drawn the full range of reaction. I found it interesting that I shared all views at different times in my life. Before Pat died, I agreed completely that schools cannot be traipsing all over the globe to protect students from themselves, that we could not make students live if they didn't want to. As a matter of fact, it is probably that kind of thinking that put me in this situation today. Now that he's gone, I can only say from experience that the nature of the disease demands more from us. There is no better proof than Pat that depression is a terminal disease and that it operates outside the realm of logic. How do we know when a student has crossed that line? We don't, and so it stands to reason that we should take a conservative approach. As my doctor has told me many times since Pat's death, depression is like cancer, only worse in the sense that it attacks the very decision-making ability that students need to seek help. If you can't depend on the students, and the parents are three thousand miles away and getting the "I'm OK" side of the story, who is left? It is only the professionals who know that depression does not "heal" after the first "episode" Even on medication, it takes longer to recover with each setback. Severely depressed patients do not "learn" from past failures. They get worse. They become more vulnerable. They are chronically ill, and even if they sought hospitalization once, as Pat did, they may be less likely to do it again because they will think they are beyond hope. My therapist tells me we can assume one thing about suicide: the person is in so much pain that death is a mandate. It's not like they went to a psychological shopping mall and unexplainably picked that choice. I have learned that it is a severe, agonizing, psychological torture, which constricts them internally but allows enough external composure to carry out their plan. Pick up any book on the subject and then think about it as I have done every day for fifteen months. If the school is sincere in improving its psychological services, follow-up after hospitalization is essential. Nobody else is equipped to do it, and the consequences may be fatal. I am not removing blame from myself or from Pat, and I appreciate those who wrote and understood that. My letter is not about finding fault. It is simply stating a fact: the school must be proactive. The psychiatric services are excellent on campus. As a friend once told Pat, "Stanford is one of the best places to have a breakdown." Extending those services is simply a matter of a phone call, in Pat's case, to the Stanford Center in Berlin. Most importantly, thank you to "A more sympathetic response," "Alyssa O'Brien," and "Grateful." You knew Pat (Was it you, Mrs. O'Brien, who nominated him for a writing prize for his paper on Juvenal? He was touched that you liked it.), and you knew how depression works. It's a thief, and it robs you blind. You cannot see your prospects unless professionals pry your eyes open. Thank you, Stanford, for the wonderful care you did give, and thank you again for continually working to improve those resources. Lisette Rimer, Pat's mom Pomfret Center, CT 06259 -- Original Source: Stanford Daily - May 14, 2007
Pychoanalysis won't fully explain VT killer
Published: Friday, April 27, 2007 Opinion articles By: Carol Duh My parents immigrated into this country in 1982. My parents told me a Taiwanese parable while I attended the same schools as Mike Pohle, one of the 32 victims of last week's massacre. In the story, a teacher took his class on a field trip to the mountains of Taiwan. On the way home, they encountered a swarm of killer bees. The teacher removed his clothing to attract the bees away from the children to his flesh. I heard the echoes of this parable while reading about Liviu Librescu, the professor who blocked the classroom door with his body while the gunman demanded entry. While he did this, students escaped through the windows. No doubt that being stung by bullets was agonizing. There was little dignity in these painful deaths, only in their sacrifice. And what of the bee? The bee who stings out of cowardice dies soon after, so we cannot ask. Panicked, we call in the world-class bee experts to explain the situation. This response, though gratifying, is in vain. Like Wall Street analysts who offer their best predictions after the fact, the analysis will not provide us with the protection we need. The bee and Seung Cho perceived threats that were not real; their behavior escapes appreciation. Let's try anyway. His parents were South Korean immigrants who sent a daughter to Princeton and a son to Virginia Tech â€” a feat worthy to boast of across many oceans. College is the frame upon which immigrants hang their hopes, but sometimes it comes at a price. The drive that steers us toward hard work is often frustrated by the apparent frivolity that pervades American campus culture. Fraternity keggers, society taps â€” these seem to be the cornerstones of the American college student's anxiety. To the ethic of a different culture, they are laughable. Seung Cho's complaints, through lunacy, tap the drumbeat of this disappointment. Seung Cho's two defining characteristics continue to be his mental health and his immigration status. Experts dissect the belongings strewn about his dorm room, scrambling for a diagnosis. Depression. Paranoia. Obviously. It is insulting to the millions of positive mental illness survivors to dwell on this. On the other hand, we could further probe the reality of cultural disparity and the specific causes he cited for his intense dissatisfaction with his experience in the United States. Yet to draw conclusions about immigration from his story is an enormous disservice to the core of the nation's foundation and strength. Both of the gunman's prominent characteristics lead to a dead end. I know a man who spent 17 years in prison. He told me that the scariest inmates are the ones who are there for life. The lifers languish in hopelessness, and claim this as license to be brutal and sadistic toward everyone else. Another man I know was born deaf and contracted AIDS in his late teens. A few years ago, Michigan tried to prosecute him for sexual predation when he, with a willful heart, transmitted the virus to 13 different people within the span of six weeks. He remains unrepentant. Why do people sink into despair? The painful simplicity of the answer escapes psychoanalysis: laziness. Seung Cho chose bitterness as his permanent sanctuary, allowing himself to drown. Yes, he was unwanted and weak, and he elicits a kind of sympathy. Perhaps the shore seemed distant and we all know that without constant encouragement, the race is long. But we do it. We brush ourselves off after devastating exams, awkward dates, even outright evidence of human unkindness. As every first-generation student will tell you, we are too lucky to be given so much. As Seung Cho embraced his victimhood, we should embrace this explanation and free ourselves from this futile search into his psyche. How should we, the children in the parable, react to this event? When confronted with people who churn bitterness into poison, the natural reaction is fear. We buy bigger guns, go to college closer to home and dead-bolt our doors. Such malevolence seems intolerable to tempt with risk. Fear is the pulse of Seung Cho's madness, and this is the lesson he expected to teach. Yet Seung forgot his role in the parable â€” the bee was never a teacher. We see the families of Virginia Tech. Grief is agony, but it will not kill us. Seung Cho underestimated the goodness his psychosis would beget. Enduring traits of the human spirit enable the sacrifice of the Taiwanese schoolteacher and the Virginia Tech professor to transcend cultural borders to show that no matter where you are, the broken heart continues to beat. This country may not always safeguard us, but retreat will not protect us. The teacher's pain was apparent, his message clearer still. Seek comfort not in bitterness, but in courage and hope. We are always safe in their arms. Carol Duh is a senior in Trumbull College. -- Original Source: Yale Daily News - April 27th, 2007
Editor-in-Chief, Yale Daily News - Sarah Mishkin <sarah.mishkin@gmail.com>
The tragedy of Virginia Tech is partly a tragedy of bureaucracy
From the Editor May/June 2007 by Kathrin Day Lassila '81 The tragedy of Virginia Tech is partly a tragedy of bureaucracy. I don't mean the sort of complaint people usually make about bureaucracy -- too much paperwork and red tape. I mean the opposite. Too few records. Too little discussion and sharing of information. Too few staff, perhaps. I'm not blaming the state of Virginia or Virginia Tech for failing to stop a determined murderer. But enough bureaucracy, of the right kind, would have given them a chance. The gun salesman would have known Seung-Hui Cho had a history of mental illness and wasn't entitled to buy guns. The associate dean who told a worried professor last fall that she hadn't heard of any previous problems would have known about the two complaints to the police and the judge's ruling that Cho was a danger to himself. The competing needs for privacy and protection can't be perfectly balanced. Colleges and universities serve a vulnerable demographic. Usually, "major mental illness first shows itself somewhere between the ages of 17 to around 25," says Lorraine Siggins, chief psychiatrist at Yale Health Services. Against those rare but terrible events, universities need discreet and careful systems. If a student has trouble and the trouble is resolved, the university has to leave the student alone to live the ordinary turbulent life of a young adult, in privacy, without stigma. But if trouble recurs, the right administrator has to be able to find out fast that this isn't the first time. The competing needs for privacy and protection can't be perfectly balanced. After VT, says Betty Trachtenberg, dean of student affairs at Yale College, university officials everywhere thought, There, but for the grace of God . . . But it's easier to have good systems and enough staff at a wealthy, relatively small private institution than a large public institution. Siggins speaks of a "web" of people at Yale who act as a safety net. Medical privacy rules prevent her staff from taking action or sharing information on any patient unless that patient is an immediate "threat to self or others." (She wouldn't comment on how often that happens and said Health Services doesn't give out statistics.) Instead, "what most frequently happens is that the person comes to people's attention in lots of different ways." The campus police report any incident involving a student to the disciplinary committee and the student's dean. In Yale College, the 12 residential college deans are the people who, says Trachtenberg, "notice when somebody's in trouble." In the professional schools, relationships with teachers and fellow students serve this need, as most schools have small student bodies (from 120 art students to 670 law students). The Graduate School has only two associate deans of student affairs for 2,600 students. But Graduate School dean Jon Butler says the 50-plus department directors of graduate studies are the people who call his office when a student is in trouble. Once the warning flags go up, administrators can, for instance, suspend a student or require the student to seek treatment. In a meeting after the VT massacre, Trachtenberg and the deans of the colleges agreed that Cho's multiple episodes of stalking and frightening students -- "behavior that is not consistent with living in a community" -- would have triggered action. Not that they can be certain. "It's very hard to think that something like this would fall through the cracks" at Yale, says Trachtenberg. "Nevertheless, I am knocking wood as I talk to you." -- Original Source: http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/current/editor.html
Permission granted by author Kathrin Lassila, kathrin.lassila@yale.edu
The vanity of reason: making sense of the Virginia Tech tragedy
Gene Koo - Thursday, April 19th, 2007 @ 5:52 pm Soon after an initial outpouring of shock and grief at the senseless murder of 32 members of the Virginia Tech community, we began seeking explanations for the tragedy. By all accounts Seung-Hui Cho, perpetrator and 33rd victim of this rampage, was a severely disturbed young man; the snippets of video released so far by NBC reveal profound paranoia. Inevitably our questions turn to what would lead him to commit such a heinous crime. We yearn for insight into his motives. Why did he do it? What was he thinking? These questions are familiar to me. I have asked them myself about my own mother, who probably developed paranoid schizophrenia some 15 years ago. I write "probably" because, like water filling a tub, the disease crept over her, imperceptibly, until suddenly it spilled forth in a flood. And somewhere in that tub, the loving woman who had been my mother drowned. I cannot know, but looking at the face in the video aired by NBC, I would guess that the real Seung-Hui Cho, someone capable of the kind of laughter and anger you and I would understand, perished long before he pulled the trigger on himself. People of sound mind often assume that individuals with mental illness think like we do: therefore, they must be misinformed, wrong-headed, or just pretending. We are, essentially, in denial. We delude ourselves into believing that we can figure these people out, and in so doing, learn how to "fix" them. In the first few years of my mother's illness, I challenged her claims that the "Chinese mafia" were spying on and stealing from her. Using lawyer's logic, I repeatedly demonstrated why it made no sense for criminals to go to such great lengths to inflict such petty wounds upon her. She would always win these fights, because madness is not susceptible to reason. What I lacked in communicating with her was not logic, but rather imagination. -- "Did you want to inject as much misery in our lives as you can," asks Mr. Cho in one video segment, "just because you can?" My mother asks these sorts of questions, too. She believes that clerks at the local store overcharge her and divert the money to her oppressors. Pedestrians stare at and spy on her. (The first part, at least, is now true due to her disheveled clothing and behavior). Vandals break into her home and move her papers around to prevent her from working. The invisible device in my ear tells her I am aiding and abetting "them." These ludicrous accusations infuriated me, but my logical counterattacks could not breach the walls around her mind. Exhausted, I learned to stop fighting her reality and to accept that she truly believes what she says. Only through imagination - a willing suspension of disbelief - could I see her world. A few years ago my mother was driving her brother around town when she unexpectedly pulled over so that the three black town cars following them would drive past. There was no one behind them, my uncle reports. But I no longer doubt that she indeed saw, in her mind, enemy agents in hostile pursuit. -- In responding to the tragic massacre Mr. Cho wrought, the public seeks criminal intent, a "motive." The media presume they can understand and explain him; the FBI believes the hateful package sent to NBC will shed insight into his motivations. I have given up that quest. The search is vanity, a misplaced faith in reason. Our criminal justice system assumes we can peer into mens rea, the criminal mind, and presumably extract thoughts and motives. Mental illness and the "insanity plea" have never fit well into this system because crimes committed by the mentally ill defy reason - and reason, it turns out, underlies our concept of justice. Like Job's entourage, our pundits and lawyers see tragedy and deduce the presence of sin. For if there is justice on Earth, then evil must have a logical human cause. But we cannot seek solace in reason when dealing with mental illness. My mother is as logical as you or I, maybe more so. Her stratagems for thwarting the spies and thieves and vandals who plague her life are subtle, cunning, and carefully executed. The only piece out of place is that you and I cannot see these tormenters. They are entirely in her own mind. -- Insanity is not stupidity, incompetence, or folly. Neither should we confuse it with evil. An important factor distinguishes my mother from Mr. Cho: while she manifests her paranoia through fear, he chose mass murder. Or is "choice" a concept that we cannot ascribe to Mr. Cho? Perhaps one day science will answer that question, reveal the origins of madness, and demonstrate which faulty wires put voices in my mother's head, or what lethal mix of hormones induced Mr. Cho to massacre. Science may yet strip the faÃƒï¿½Ã¯Â¿Â½Ãƒï¿½Ã‚Â§ade of free will from every one of us, revealing nothing but seething masses of neurons. And we would be farther than ever from finding the source of evil. Lawyers have a formula for calculating guilt that accounts for mitigations like provocation or insanity. That formula may be readjusted now and then, but its ultimate function is to balance the equation of justice and ensure that criminal debts are paid. But we cannot so easily cancel the pain we all feel when a man guns down innocents, or when a mother neglects her family. It is more than the pain of our immediate loss. We suffer because we are separated from mortal understanding; we have peered over the edge of reason and seen the whirlwind beyond. -- Original Source: Anderkoo - The vanity of reason Permissions: CreativeCommons-Attribution-Sharealike 2.5
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Gene Koo - April 21, 2007 @ 6:42 pm · Filed under Code / Code A report in today's New York Times illustrates both the promise and the difficulties of (legal) code as (software) code (U.S. Rules Made Killer Ineligible to Purchase Gun). Apparently, slight discrepancies between the wording of Virginia and federal laws that disqualify the "mentally defective" from purchasing a handgun created a gap that enabled Seung-Hui Cho to purchase the weapons he used to carry out his killing spree: ...[T]he form that Virginia courts use to notify state police about a mental health disqualification addresses only the state criteria, which list two potential categories that would warrant notification to the state police: someone who was "involuntarily committed" or ruled mentally "incapacitated." However, Mr. Cho belonged to a third category: "determination by a court, board, commission or other lawful authority" that as a result of mental illness, the person is a "danger to himself or others." Thus, a special justice's order that he seek outpatient care and that also declared him an imminent danger to himself was never transmitted to the federal system of handling background checks for handgun purchases. The article mentions Representative Carolyn McCarthy's efforts to "automate their criminal history records so computer databases used to conduct background checks on gun buyers are more complete." McCarthy (who happens to represent my hometown) introduced in January H.R. 297. The bill would require state officials to report disqualifications to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) as well as provide funds to fund "establish or upgrade information and identification technologies for firearms eligibility determinations" and "improve the automation and transmittal to federal and state record repositories" disqualifying factors. Monday's tragedy offers an extreme example of what happens when jurisdictions fail to reconcile discrepancies in their laws. The answer, however, doesn't really lie in information technology. Virginia laws didn't match federal laws, no matter what the technological implementation; no amount of software coding would have changed that. IT can speed up the transfer of information, but an information pipe with no connection on the other side would still be a road to nowhere. Fixing state-federal disconnects will require more than just software code: it will take monkeying around with old-fashioned legal code. (See also my personal response to the Virginia Tech shootings). -- Original Source: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/vvvv/2007/04/21/coding-gun-control/ Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5.
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Gene Koo (gkoo@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
Thursday, April 19. 2007 As all of America mourns the deaths which occurred on the Virginia Tech campus, bloggers are drawing comparisons to the body count that issues daily from Iraq. See a particularly poignant post from Floyd Rudmin of commondreams.org titled "32 Senseless Deaths: A Chance for Empathy, Change of Heart, and Change of Course" which concludes: The tragedy at Virginia Tech was caused by lone gunman, probably deranged. It was a one-time event. It is finished. The tragedy in Iraq was caused by the US government, with the over-whelming support of the US Congress, most of the US media, and much of the US population. This war was planned and executed by rational men and women, none of them deranged. The US decided to start the war against Iraq. The US decided to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq. The US decided to destroy the Iraqi government and to disband its police and army. The US decided to send too few soldiers to secure the nation after doing these destructive deeds. And the tragedy of Iraq is not a one-time event. It is not finished. It continues, apparently without end. By many reports, the US is now preparing to start another war, this time against Iran. Americans feeling the shock and grief of the tragedy at Virginia Tech should look into their hearts and realize that they through their government are bringing this same tragedy again, and again, and again, and again, and again, endlessly and needlessly, to other people in the world who also have hearts that can be torn out, who also feel grief and loss when family and friends are suddenly killed when doing ordinary things of life, like going to school. Tragic deaths force us to feel our humanity and to see we are similar to others in the world. The tragic deaths in Virginia might serve to motivate Americans to curb their militarism and to minimize the tragedies of sudden death that they have been bringing to other families in the world. Read the full article. It is heartening to witness a vigorous debate emerging online as people come to terms with these killings and their significance, not only for the victims and their families and friends, but for an entire culture. As Americans draw comparisons to Iraq, we who are not American are reminded that America is a house divided. I sometimes catch myself drawing hasty generalizations, styling all Americans as arrogant war-mongerers. But the comments I read online remind me that, in fact, those who share the president's world view stand in a minority. I must pause to recognize that most Americans grieve for the state of their country and fear for their safety abroad. As non-Americans, our generalizations merely implicate us in the sins we condemn. Perhaps a more difficult task comes in moderating the generalizations we make as we consider Cho Seung-Hui who was the perpetrator of these killings. Every account I have read thus far refers to him as "deranged." Doubtless a person who commits mass murder is mentally ill. But the use of this particular epithet continues the media habit of drawing a causal connection between violence and mental illness. This is an oversimplification, much like the suggestion that American troops are in Iraq to stabilize a country that has no infrastructure of its own. The media's continuing association of violence and mental illness perpetuates the stigma which haunts millions of people who suffer from major mental health issues. In fact, mental illness is not a significant indicator of violence. See this pdf document from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. Indicators which are more significant include: youth, male gender, and history of violence or substance abuse. Let me make that a little clearer: if you are a male, that fact alone is a stronger predictor of violent behaviour than if you suffer from schizophrenia. A non-clinical list of indicators might also include such factors as availability of weapons and exposure to desensitizing materials (e.g. video games, movies, media that televise a killer's manifesto and cell phone video of shots being fired, etc). From the CAMH document comes this quote: "While it is true that some people who have a mental illness do commit crimes, public perceptions of mentally ill persons as criminally dangerous are exaggerated. In fact, 80 to 90 percent of people with mental illness never commit violent acts. They are actually more likely to have acts of violence committed against them, particularly homeless individuals who may also have a mental illness." (Italics added.) If the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violent acts, then it is possible that Cho Seung-Hui only became a risk after he was, himself, victimized. Following the shootings at Columbine, it was revealed that the shooters, Harris & Klebold, were victims of significant bullying. The same is probably true in this instance. See here for a profile of Cho. Let's not perpetrate a generalization about mental illness. Let's seize this moment as an opportunity to put an end to a cycle of violence by putting an end to our fears of mental illness. I would invite Floyd Rudmin and commondreams.org to revise their post. There were 33 senseless deaths. To state that there were 32 reveals a stigmatizing bias that we must reckon with. Otherwise, our generalizations merely implicate us in the sins we condemn. Posted by David Barker in Health/Mental Health at 23:08 -- Original Source: http://theoblog.ca/serendipity/archives/248-Cho-Seung-Hui-A-Lone-Deranged-Gunman.html Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5.
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