The Failure of the Modern Mental Health System at Virginia Tech

First there's this tidbit from a much longer worthy post on the Hot Air Blog regarding the developing information on VT Shooter Cho Seung-Hui

There’s new information about him this morning but most of it is stuff we already know. The cops held a press conference to say that he stalked two women in 2005 and then got sent away to a mental hospital for a spell, which we learned last night from that bizarre CNN interview with his two former roommates. Meanwhile, the NYT has a scoop about the cops having initially misidentified the suspect in the first shooting as Emily Hilscher’s gun-aficionado boyfriend. If only the LA Times hadn’t had the same scoop hours earlier.

Here’s some genuinely new information, though, via ABC News. A forensic psychiatrist who’s been following the story says Cho’s behavior sounds familiar, and it goes way beyond depression

Etc.

All of which merely does not damn the mental health workers at the university, who god knows, were trying to deal with all of the craziness that is the modern college student.

The problem is a system that is simply not capable of spotting and then competently handling the fruitcake who might buy a gun in the next year.

By most accounts this guy frightened his professors and classmates.
It was not a problem of spotting him. It was a problem in knowing what was the correct thing to do, as far as Hui was concerned.

(In case anyone has any doubts, the Secret Service long ago put together a profile of people who had been involved in school shootings. Hui seems to have fit this profile very well. You can see a summary of this report here, and the full report here [both in PDF format])

It is not merely a matter of having the ability to lock someone up involuntarily, or to prescribe the right combination of medications. While public safety might be served for a short while by a lock up, or a chemical straight jacket, the fact of the matter is that they did not know what the most effective course of action is in advance.

As an example, just in the past few days, well known Hollywood actor Richard Gere got into trouble in India for kissing a well known Indian Actress on a stage during a benefit for Aids Awareness. The Problem is that in India, kissing in public is considered an obscene act in some quarters! There may even be criminal charges!

I can imagine a person with such strong personal values going to school at any American university would have many personal issues. If you factor in other personal problems, isolation, and the like, I can see the potential for a time bomb developing. The solution for such a person would not be medication.

The people in India rioted due to an event that was, frankly, a severe break with their own traditional expectations and morals. How do you handle a person who has a similar break with their own expectations, etc. due to culture shock, etc. ??? How do you identify such persons?

Part of the solution would be courses in personal relations, successful communication skills, and dealing with people from other cultural backgrounds, courses designed to develop skills to cope with such shocks and clashes with reality.

Normally these things would be "part of growing up", but obviously there are some that arrive at college or university with these skills lacking. To avoid stigma, something like a "Basics in Human Relations" course and a "Fundamentals of Adult Living" course should be required of all freshman and all people transferring into the school

But this is not part of the mental health system. They are not set up to train and educate people in missing social skills. They are there to hand out medications, and to call the cops when people get too weird. They are not equipped to handle anything else. They are not capable of detecting or handling such things, except when the breakdown is so dramatic as to require the men in the white coats, etc.

And that is the major problem. They do not know what to do. Giving them more funds when they do not know what to do will not fix the situation by itself.

And yes, there are even psychiatrists who recognize that America's mental health system is broken, that it is dysfunctional. Not that we agree with the treatment, but there is some recognition of the problem