Mental illness is not a static state. It frequently involves episiodes of sanity between psychotic breaks. It involves seeing the world in a slanted way.

This idea that they are impossible to predict is rubbish. Most people who do this have an orchestrated plan it has taken them months or usually years to set up and do. It’s not done on impulse at all. It’s based on long standing fantasies which they usually divulge to those close to them. I know because I have seen people divulge aberrant plans and act on them years later.

Mental health checkups are critical and everyone should have one – there are tons of measures that have been shown useful for predictors of abberant behaviour. If everyone was given an MMPI to check for personality traits and a SPECT scan to check for abnormal brain functioning and I think that would help enormously to see who might be at risk for committing such acts. A lot of the people who do it are having a psychotic break. CHo was showing flat affect, a known marker for schizophrenia. We can predict who is most likley to commit sucha crime. these people need social supports. We have to identify them and get them supports.

Why are we letting people on psychotropic medication have access to guns and ammo??

Here is the URL for a 54 page technical paper on risk factors for shooters.
http://www.education.ucsb.edu/schpsych/School-Violence/PDF/RiskFactorsShootings.pdf
In it, it is mentioned that most shooters describe there plans in detail prior to committing their act. They are mentally rehersing and than verbally rehersing. It is similar to the process a persion uses when they are quitting smoking in that they are getting to think of themselevs as the sort of person who should act in this new way. But in this case the ‘new way” is to be a murderer and a committer of suicide. They need help to see this is NOT the only option of dealing with their problems and it’s a very poor option at that.

Cho and Kimveer Gill went over their plans in their writings. People who saw their behaviour were disturbed by this. But they were young and didn’t know what recourse they had.

We need to get the word out to teenagers and twenty somehtings what I learned the hard way.

People who are on psychotropic meds should NOT HAVE ACCESS TO GUNS. I say this as someone in an unusual position to know. I have a degree in psych and also a diagnosis of chronic depression. I once had such bad insomia I started geting break through REM and knew I was on the edge of or already in a psychotic state. I took myself in to the hospital. I know a tin of people with mental illness. The drugs do not always work on everyone. In particular I know two people who engaged in extremely aberrant acts – one, my ex, committed suicide (this is before I was takin psychology and before my own depression diagnosis. He had told me all about his plan to kill himself, and I didn’t know what to do. I was horrified and Iit sort o froze me. I think this is what happened to the people who Cho and Kimveer Gil told their violent fantasies and plans to. People want to think everyone is normal but ruminating on repetative violent actions is NOT NORMAL!

I tried to talk him out of it but if I had known at 20 what I do now I would have gotten him into therapy.

The other was another ex who years after we broke up enacted a very public theft which he had fantasized about for months years before when we weer dating. After we broke up I didn’t think about it much. Friends called me to say he was on the national news for having attempted to steal the mace from the Canadian house of Commons. The RCMP had arrested him and he was being held for a 14 day psych assessment. I wasn;t at all surprised. he had gone over and over it in his head, like a person getting up the nerve to do skydiving or quit smoking. Thank God neither of these two’s fantasies involved killing or shooting!

People who do most abberant behaviour this sort of thing plan it out in their heads. Then they speak of it. More people need to get these violent talkers help before they have time to amass the weapons and whatever else is needed to commit the mass murders Because of what I’ve learned I managed to interfere with 3 other people I know from commiting suicide.

http://www.invisiblechildren.org/weblog

Jeff Weise also kept an outrageous website openly referencing homicide and suicide. Jeff was also denied treatment and prescribed Prozac*. After the carnage, Red Lake community found the money for a mental health family center to counsel troubled youth.

At that time in Minnesota there were 15 child psychiatrists in the entire state (population about 4 million) and the student to counsellor ratio in MN high schools was 900 to 1.

As a child advocate (long time guardian ad Litem) I strongly feel the need for mental health therapy for those who need it. The children I work with have been severely traumatized and need adequate attention paid to their needs.

In my many years as a guardian ad-Litem it has been my experience that at risk children don’t get help until after their behaviors have become unmanageable and dangerous. Often the help they get comes in the form of a pill and not the personal professional counselling that they really need.

A Hennepin county judge has shared with me the psychotropic drug medications being taken by children in her courtroom. It is truely unbelievable how many disturbed and undertreated youth walk among us.

When attention to mental health services comes earlier, our communities can save themselves from the immense suffering that follows these horrific events.

* Not too many years from now it is my hope that we will recognize the repercussions of legally drugging children with psychotropic medications without adequate mental health services. Today we can only read about these consequences in the newspaper.

Why has no one suggested that the killer at VA Tech was a psychopath? There is so much research done on the subject – Robert Hare’s book is the classic text. There is a whole lit. out there on the phenomenon and Hare’s checklist of what constitutes a psychopath will definitely suit Cho’s profile. Though the investigations may take many months, I am positive that it will be revealed with time that Cho was a psychopath by Robert Hare’s definition. No emotions, no empathy, no feelings for others, cold-bloodedness, high rationality, and no communication or social skills. There is no need to be looking for other mental illnesses if this particular disorder (also known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder) is out there, well-researched and there is so much evidence that serial and mass killers are ALWAYS psychopaths. While it is true that most psychopaths are non-violent (in fact, most psychopaths are intelligent and excell in many fields; many can be found on Wall Street because they make the best financial executives – cold-blooded and willing to take such risks upon themselves that normal persons with emotions would be incapable of), those who do committ mass murders are always them. I wonder what the American Assoc. of Psychologists is doing these days if not informing the public about such an important and widespread disorder (it’s not even illness – psychopaths simply LACK emotions) and not training educators from K to college to recognize these traits in children and young people. And how many Americans today know that one of the Columbine killers (Harris) was a hard-core psychopath? Have we not learned anything from that massacre? Until the knowledge about psychopaths trickles down to the general public, we cannot hope to catch individuals of Cho’s kind until after the act.

About guns- it’s totally wrong that a person who is as unstable and psychotic as the gunman in this tragedy can go into a gunstore and buy a gun.
There should be a system of checks- you have to pass a test to get even a drivers licence- why isn’t there any checks- psychological and safety and competence tests when someone buys a weapon as dangerous and deadly as a gun?

Why are there guns on campuses anyways? After 9/11 and threats of terrorists, why aren’t there metal detectors at the doors of dorms and school and other public buildings? Why isn’t our government doing a better job with keeping us safe from these terrible violent acts of terror?
i’m afraid to go anywhere. If anyone can buy a gun then we’re at their mercy- it isn’t healthy or safe or sane. The government should do a much better job at keeping us safe. No guns at school. No guns at court- no guns at school either. Also- checks- psychological tests and safety knowledge tests should be manditory- a safe waiting period of at least 30 days and a valid reason that a gun is needed. We’re NOT the same society as we were in 1776. Terrorists and persons who terrorize others are inside this country and it’s not in the law abiding citizen’s interests to allow anyone to have a gun without passing any safety testing or manditory waiting period in EVERY state.

Why does anyone who is a student in college need a gun?

We’re not safe. Precious people are losing their lives at the hands of sick and violent people and we need to take steps now to make this nation a safer place.

It’s so troubling to me about all the talk of ‘marking persons’ with emotional problems and mental disorders. What if persons with mental disabilities/problems won’t be allowed in colleges anymore because they start to be seen as a threat? That would be so unfair- most of persons with mental problems would never be violent against another. i’m afraid that there will be a stigma against them now, making it even more difficult to succeed in college than it is already because of incidents like this. One TV station in my city suggested call-in/ email response question to the public about “not allowing students in college if they’re known to have mental problems”- that’s so unfair.

The horrific incident could not have happened at Columbine or Virginia Tech without guns. Students never need to have a gun and they never need to bring guns to school or to any public building.
Give us a chance to be safe and not see innocent lives taken by a gun in the wrong person’s hands again.

For love’s sake,
kerria

The shootings have _not_ stopped. They live on with those impacted directly and indirectly. To see so many attempts _everwhere_ at highjacking this to political rants is heartbreaking especially those so disconnected from reality as to be their own form of psychopathy.

So … is it better to help someone one-on-one or by ranting? Which one involves another warm human being? Which one is a _saner_ choice?

The shooting has stopped. The news networks are analyzing. And an event that spanned but a few hours will be remembered forever, especially by those whose lives were touched by the violence on the Virginia Tech campus. At the end of the day, what we have left is really a leadership issue. And that is the hard part, because it requires us to look closely at what we have allowed.

It is up to us, those who control how and why we make a profit. Resolute leaders refuse dollars that come from violent video games. They say “no” to rap music and its poisonous message of hate, racism and violence. It’s time to take full accountability of the examples we set as leaders, and make those examples worth mirroring.

What if the Virginia Tech murderer had received different messages? What if his examples of right and wrong came from resolute leaders instead of defective personas? We can’t change what happened. We can influence what happens next.

To read my whole posting: http://www.resoluteleadership.com/2007/04/17/beyond-the-massacre-at-virginia-tech/