Ire and Vice: The Dead

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 — who have worked hard their whole lives to get here, who have so much to look forward to — 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 — 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 — perfectionists, go-getters, workaholics — 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 — 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.

<b>Comments on this article:</b>

<b> Cat</b> - 5/22/07
Wow, great piece!
Just finished the Campus Climate Questionaire and found it hokey.

<b> L </b> - 5/22/07
Cute rhetoric but you aren&#39;t taking the whole situation into account. It isn&#39;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...

<b> J </b> - 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.

<b> Eric </b> - 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.

<b>Jason Kerwin </b> - 5/22/07
This is exceptional writing. I&#39;ve learned to expect far less from the Daily.

L is right about the clinical depression angle. It&#39;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.

<b> David </b> - 5/22/07

Darren&#39;s articles shouldn&#39;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&#39;s articles and I see that dreaded "comments on this article:" line, I&#39;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&#39;ll find my work already done for me.

<b> s </b>- 5/23/07

Just a quick note - The Bridge did not have anything to do with the corny Campus Climate survey.

<b> I wanted to kill myself 2 </b>- 5/23/07
And it&#39;s not because of myself, I would have if I were able to do such thing. But it&#39;s because the way Stanford treats me every day (and especially the incompetence of student housing). So, since we&#39;re paying so much for health insurance anyway, they should include eutanasia for students. That way they wouldn&#39;t have to deal with usbickering after getting so much abuse from this university.

<b>Nicole D </b>- 5/23/07
I think it&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s a really uncomfortable thing to do, but it only this sort of continuous self-evaluation that can ensure that we&#39;re living the life we really want by standards we set for ourselves.

This is where I think therapy comes in. I&#39;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&#39;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&#39;t think therapy is a miracle cure, but it was certainly one of the best thing I&#39;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&#39;t know if there&#39;s a stigma about seeking out mental help here at Stanford because, quite frankly, I&#39;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&#39;m a firm believer that the majority of the American population needs to change its attitude towards mental health. I think it&#39;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&#39;s Counseling and Psychological Services. It&#39;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


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Original Source: <a href="http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2007/5/22/ireAndViceTheDead"> Stanford Daily - May 22, 2007</a>

Darren Franich

Stanford Daily

2007-06-13

Sara Hood

Permissions granted by
James Hohmann
Editor-in-Chief
The Stanford Daily
<jhohmann@stanford.edu>

eng

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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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 Siemens—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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;t because we don&#39;t know they are necessary. We don&#39;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&#39;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&#39;t the school follow up on Pat&#39;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 — even the best, like Pat — are simply not capable. Depressed students don&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39; confidence in the safety of their children on campus — 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&#39; 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&#39;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&#39;s mom
Pomfret Center, Connnecticut

<b>Comment on this article </b>

<b>Jon Bell</b> - 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.

<b> Ted Rudow III,MA </b>- 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&#39;s bad manners to ask a man who is trying to help us if he really knows what he&#39;s doing. Of course, it&#39;s not just manners that prevent us from questioning psychology. It&#39;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&#39;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.

<b> Ted Rudow III, Scientologist </b> - 5/14/07
Hey Ted, what exactly do you mean by, "psychology is actually harmful." That&#39;s a pretty nice blanket statement there. What you&#39;re meaning to say is, clinical psychology isn&#39;t always effective. The studies you list aren&#39;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&#39;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.

<b>Why did you even give her space?</b> - 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&#39;t do, just to make yourself feel better and ignore what really did happen, most of which probably wouldn&#39;t have changed even with all the nannying you suggest.

<b> The Real BadgerNation </b> - 5/14/07
I agree...
and President Hannessy&#39;s fake smile and politically correct image are a clear sign that he cares. Same way G.W.&#39;s visits to Iraq and shaking of those people&#39;s hands, taking pictures and putting up a big baboon smile show that he also cares... about sending America&#39;s sons to die.

<b> Why is this letter in the Daily? </b>- 5/15/07
I agree with WDYEGHS - it&#39;s not very helpful to expect that CAPS could be able to &#39;follow-up&#39; on GRADUATES (who aren&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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.

<b>A more sympathetic response...</b> - 5/15/07
I think the three posts above me are not giving this well thought out article enough credit. I don&#39;t think she&#39;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&#39;s mental rehabilitation, I think the more important thing to take away is the author&#39;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.

<b> Alyssa O&#39;Brien, PWR Instructor</b> - 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&#39;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.

<b> Grateful</b> - 5/17/07
Thank you for sharing your painful and most personal experience. Your letter points out the difference between sadness and depression. Don&#39;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.

<b> Lisette Rimer</b> - 5/20/07

Dear Mr. Hohmann,

Thank you for being so generous with space in the Daily for Pat&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;t, and so it stands to reason that we should take a conservative approach. As my doctor has told me many times since Pat&#39;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&#39;t depend on the students, and the parents are three thousand miles away and getting the "I&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s case, to the Stanford Center in Berlin.

Most importantly, thank you to "A more sympathetic response," "Alyssa O&#39;Brien," and "Grateful." You knew Pat (Was it you, Mrs. O&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s mom
Pomfret Center, CT 06259

--

Original Source: <a href="http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2007/5/14/opedAnOpenLetterToPresidentHennessy"> Stanford Daily - May 14, 2007</a>

Lisette Rimer

Stanford Daily

2007-06-13

Sara Hood

Permissions granted by
James Hohmann
Editor-in-Chief
The Stanford Daily
<jhohmann@stanford.edu>

eng

Pychoanalysis won&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s try anyway. His parents were South Korean immigrants who sent a daughter to Princeton and a son to Virginia Tech — 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 — these seem to be the cornerstones of the American college student&#39;s anxiety. To the ethic of a different culture, they are laughable. Seung Cho&#39;s complaints, through lunacy, tap the drumbeat of this disappointment.

Seung Cho&#39;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&#39;s foundation and strength. Both of the gunman&#39;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&#39;s madness, and this is the lesson he expected to teach.

Yet Seung forgot his role in the parable — 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&#39;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: <a href="http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/20957"> Yale Daily News - April 27th, 2007</a>

Sara Hood

2007-06-11

Sara Hood

Editor-in-Chief, Yale Daily News - Sarah Mishkin <sarah.mishkin@gmail.com>

eng

The tragedy of Virginia Tech is partly a tragedy of bureaucracy

<b>From the Editor</b>

May/June 2007
by <a href="mailto:kathrin.lassila@yale.edu">Kathrin Day Lassila</a> &#39;81

<b>The tragedy of Virginia Tech is partly a tragedy of bureaucracy.</b>

I don&#39;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&#39;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&#39;t entitled to buy guns. The associate dean who told a worried professor last fall that she hadn&#39;t heard of any previous problems would have known about the two complaints to the police and the judge&#39;s ruling that Cho was a danger to himself.

The competing needs for privacy and protection can&#39;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&#39;t the first time.

The competing needs for privacy and protection can&#39;t be perfectly balanced. After VT, says Betty Trachtenberg, dean of student affairs at Yale College, university officials everywhere thought, <i>There, but for the grace of God . . .</i>

But it&#39;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&#39;t comment on how often that happens and said Health Services doesn&#39;t give out statistics.) Instead, "what most frequently happens is that the person comes to people&#39;s attention in lots of different ways."

The campus police report any incident involving a student to the disciplinary committee and the student&#39;s dean. In Yale College, the 12 residential college deans are the people who, says Trachtenberg, "notice when somebody&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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: <a href="http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/current/editor.html">http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/current/editor.html</a>

Kathrin Day Lassila

2007-06-11

Sara Hood

Permission granted by author Kathrin Lassila, kathrin.lassila@yale.edu

eng

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&#39;s illness, I challenged her claims that the "Chinese mafia" were spying on and stealing from her. Using lawyer&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s head, or what lethal mix of hormones induced Mr. Cho to massacre. Science may yet strip the fa���§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: <a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/anderkoo/2007/04/19/the-vanity-of-reason-making-sense-of-the-virginia-tech-tragedy/">Anderkoo - The vanity of reason</a>

Permissions: <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/">CreativeCommons-Attribution-Sharealike 2.5</a>

Gene Koo

2007-06-07

Sara Hood

CreativeCommons-Attribution-Sharealike 2.5

eng

Coding Gun Control

<p>Gene Koo - April 21, 2007 @ 6:42 pm &#183; Filed under <a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/vvvv/tag/code-code/">Code / Code</a></p>
<p>A report in today&#39;s New York Times illustrates both the promise and the difficulties of (legal) code as (software) code (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/21/us/21guns.html">U.S. Rules Made Killer Ineligible to Purchase Gun</a>). 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:</p>
<blockquote>...[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."</blockquote>
<p>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&#39;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.</p>
<p>The article mentions Representative Carolyn McCarthy&#39;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 <a href="http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?tab=summary&bill=h110-297">H.R. 297</a>. 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.</p>
<p>Monday&#39;s tragedy offers an extreme example of what happens when jurisdictions fail to reconcile discrepancies in their laws. The answer, however, doesn&#39;t really lie in information technology. Virginia laws didn&#39;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.</p>
<p>(See also <a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/anderkoo/2007/04/19/the-vanity-of-reason-making-sense-of-the-virginia-tech-tragedy/">my personal response to the Virginia Tech shootings</a>).</p>
<p>--</p>
<p>Original Source: <a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/vvvv/2007/04/21/coding-gun-control/">http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/vvvv/2007/04/21/coding-gun-control/</a></p>
<p>Licensed under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5</a>.</p>

Gene Koo

2007-06-06

Sara Hood

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5

Gene Koo (gkoo@cyber.law.harvard.edu)

eng

Cho Seung-Hui: A Lone Deranged Gunman?

<p>Thursday, April 19. 2007</p>
<p>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 <b>commondreams.org</b> titled "32 Senseless Deaths: A Chance for Empathy, Change of Heart, and Change of Course" which concludes:</p>
<blockquote>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.</blockquote>
<blockquote>The US decided to start the war against Iraq.</blockquote>
<blockquote>The US decided to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq.</blockquote>
<blockquote>The US decided to destroy the Iraqi government and to disband its police and army.</blockquote>
<blockquote>The US decided to send too few soldiers to secure the nation after doing these destructive deeds.</blockquote>
<blockquote>And the tragedy of Iraq is not a one-time event. It is not finished. It continues, apparently without end.</blockquote>
<blockquote>By many reports, the US is now preparing to start another war, this time against Iran.</blockquote>
<blockquote>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.</blockquote>
<blockquote>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.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Read the <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/18/593/">full article</a>.</blockquote>
<p>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&#39;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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The media&#39;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 <b>not</b> a significant indicator of violence. See this pdf document from the <a href="http://theoblog.ca/serendipity/archives/www.camh.net/education/Resources_communities_organizations/addressing_stigma_senatepres03.pdf">Centre for Addiction and Mental Health</a>. 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&#39;s manifesto and cell phone video of shots being fired, etc). From the CAMH document comes this quote:</p>
<blockquote>"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. <i>They are actually more likely to have acts of violence committed against them</i>, particularly homeless individuals who may also have a mental illness." (Italics added.)</blockquote>
<p>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 <i>after</i> 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 <a href="http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070416/school_shootings_070415">profile of Cho</a>.</p>
<p>Let&#39;s not perpetrate a generalization about mental illness. Let&#39;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 <b>commondreams.org</b> 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.</p>
<p>Posted by <a href="http://theoblog.ca/serendipity/authors/1-David-Barker">David Barker</a> in <a href="http://theoblog.ca/serendipity/categories/8-HealthMental-Health">Health/Mental Health</a> at <a href="http://theoblog.ca/serendipity/archives/248-Cho-Seung-Hui-A-Lone-Deranged-Gunman.html">23:08</a></p>
<p>--</p>
<p>Original Source: <a href="http://theoblog.ca/serendipity/archives/248-Cho-Seung-Hui-A-Lone-Deranged-Gunman.html">http://theoblog.ca/serendipity/archives/248-Cho-Seung-Hui-A-Lone-Deranged-Gunman.html</a></p>
<p>Licensed under <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5</a>.</p>

David Barker

2007-06-06

Brent Jesiek

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5

eng