US Universities Searching for Solutions to Avoid Future Massacres

oops1

Following the tragedy at VA Tech, universities and colleges across US are looking for more effective measures to discover and prevent serious mental health problems in students.

It is clear now that the Virginia Tech shooter was a disturbed man with an obvious inclination towards violence and destruction. He was described in that manner by his former roommates, teachers and colleagues. No one knew however that he was also a grand maniac until NBC aired pictures and a short video made by the killer apparently when he was heading towards Norris Hall.

The package that was sent to NBC on Monday morning (which explains in a twisted and sad manner why he wasn’t caught after the dorm shootings) contained some pictures taken by the shooter himself and a short video, partially aired by the popular TV station last night. The material clearly proves that Cho was a seriously mentally deranged student, who hated the rich and fancied himself as an “inspirer” for the poor.

According to more and more descriptions from professors and roommates, the 23 years old Cho Seung-Hui, a South Korea-born senior English major at the university, had given those around him enough reasons to think something is wrong and that he is about to do something bad.

One of his roommates, who spoke during ABC’s \"Good Morning America\", said Hui had a very bizarre and introvert behavior, rarely answering with more than a word at questions posed to him: “I tried to make conversation with him earlier in the year when he moved in,” Joseph Aust said. “He would just give one-word answers and stay quiet. He pretty much never looked me in the eye.”

CNN reported that one of Hui’s teachers, poet Nikki Giovanni had him removed from his class because of his way of behaving: “It was not bad poetry. It was intimidating. At first I thought, OK, he's trying to see what the parameters are. Kids curse and talk about a lot of different things. He stayed in that spot. I said, 'You can't do that.' He said, 'Yes, I can.' I said, 'No, not in my class.'\"

She also confessed that she arranged security checks on her room after witnessing Hui’s odd manifestations, also stressing out that some of her students stopped coming to her class because Cho was taking photos of them with his cell phone.

Two students who said they were Cho's roommates said he had harassed several female students in the past and once told them he wanted to kill himself, which prompted the roommates to report their concerns to the police. His ex-roommates also expressed concern that Hui had become even less predictable in recent weeks.

Moreover, fellow students on his English literature course remember an odd young man. One, Julie Poole, recalled that on the first day of his English class last year, the students went round the room, introducing themselves. Everyone said their name but Cho.

Professor Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the university's English department, said Cho's writing was so disturbing that he had been referred to the university's counseling service.

\"Sometimes, in creative writing, people reveal things and you never know if it's creative or if they're describing things, if they're imagining things or just how real it might be,\" Rude said. \"But we're all alert to not ignore things like this.\"

\"When we read Cho's plays, it was like something out of a nightmare,\" former classmate Ian MacFarlane, now an AOL employee, wrote in a blog posted on an AOL Web site.

\"The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn't have even thought of.\"

A Virginia \"special justice\" ruled in 2005 that the student, Cho Seung-Hui, was \"mentally ill\" and an \"imminent danger\" to at least himself, and possibly others.

Campus counsellors insisted they had focused on the young man, but added it was impossible to know his relatively benign, if antisocial, behaviour would result in the carnage he unleashed on Monday.

\"Clearly, if anyone had any warning of a violent incident, people would have stepped in and acted,\" said Chris Flynn, a campus counsellor. \"This university is extremely proactive at meeting and discussing students of concern.\"

So the question is how could such a clearly mentally-ill student, with such obvious inclinations towards evil, be allowed to legally buy guns with no restrictions whatsoever?

School administrators are complaining about the fact that they can always be accused of not doing anything to prevent horrors from happening, or that they do too much. College counselors - who every year see more students suffering from depression, anxiety and stress - say it's far more complicated than that.

In a study from 2005, 55% of the 400 12- to 18-year-olds investigated by researchers from Kaiser Permanente Northern California were found to have mental-health problems such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders, or behavioral disorders.

Among the most frequent risk factors cited in mental health disorders in adolescents are sexual abuse, alcohol and other drugs and the need to perform. Most common mental health problems cited in scientific studies are depression, eating-disorders and bipolar-disorder. Children and teenagers with bipolar disorder have manic and/or depressive symptoms. Some may have mostly depression and others a combination of manic and depressive symptoms.

“The question is: what duty do schools have to protect and take care of their students?\" said Dr. Victor Schwartz, a psychiatrist and dean of students at New York's Yeshiva University.

Looking at the tragedy in Virginia, David Hayes, a clinical psychologist and director of the psychology training program at Louisiana State University's student health center, gave a succinct assessment: \"Every university in the country knows that could have been them.\"

In response to what happened Monday, universities throughout the nation are reviewing their security and emergency plans. West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin ordered the state's public colleges and universities to review their plans and procedures and report to him as soon as possible.

College officials don't always share information with each other, because of confidentiality concerns or simply poor communication, and counseling centers may be so overwhelmed that students have to put their names on a waiting list before they're seen. Universities generally don't have psychiatrists on hand who specialize in detecting potential criminal behavior, nor do they have in-patient facilities or round-the-clock counselors.

However, signs of improvement are also visible. At MIT, every faculty member last fall received a pamphlet on how to help students in distress. UMass-Lowell administrators held a faculty dinner two months ago to discuss warning signs of mental illness and have followed up with workshops on the challenges of the current generation of students.

“At the University of Missouri, if someone makes a suicide attempt, they mandate four counseling sessions, for example,” said Dr. Kadison, an author of “College of the Overwhelmed: The Campus Mental Health Crisis and What To Do About It.”

Mental health services that used to serve largely as career counseling centers now often assess or treat many students with real psychiatric illnesses. Colleges try to train parents, roommates, and faculty in the signs of suicide and sources of help when a student seems to be going off track.

Nevertheless, there is still a lot of work to do. Colleges can't screen students for mental illnesses during the admissions process because that violates the Americans With Disabilities Act. As a result, schools know which students will need tutoring or want to play soccer, but have no idea who is likely to need mental-health care, Fleming said.

Virginia Tech and most other universities cannot summarily suspend a student. Formal disciplinary charges must be filed and hearings held. Students who initiate a complaint often end up dropping the matter.

Nor can schools expect courts to hospitalize a student involuntarily without solid evidence that he poses a danger to himself or others.

\"Your hands are really tied unless you feel that there's some sort of imminent danger,\" said Richard Kadison, chief of mental health services at Harvard University.

Kadison, who has researched trends in mental health, said a recent Harvard survey found roughly 45 percent of the student body had experienced debilitating depression, and 10 percent had considered suicide.

\"There can be a whole range of triggers,\" he said. \"Basically the big issue is really educating the whole community to know what some of the warning signs are to indicate a student's in trouble.\"

\"As with the student on Monday, there might be writings, drawings that exhibit violence of harm to self or others, withdrawal, a change in friends, sleeping or eating patterns, changes in grades or involvement in school activities, thinking about suicide, giving away of belongings meaningful to them, a fascination with violence or violent things,\" said Jill Cook, assistant director of the American School Counselor Association.

Ted Feinberg, assistant executive director for the National Association of School Psychologists, said it's important to look at the whether a student has a network of friends and family from whom he or she can get emotional relief.

http://www.playfuls.com/news_006 ... ture_Massacres.html