"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

"For straight up monster-stomping goodness, nothing makes smoke shoot out my ears like Brilliant@Breakfast" -- Tata

"...the best bleacher bum since Pete Axthelm" -- Randy K.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Wednesday, April 18, 2007

The mind of a troubled kid
Posted by Jill | 6:47 AM
The sheer and utter cluelessness that accompanies the coverage of the mind of Cho Seung-Hui, who has been identified as the Virginia Tech shooter, just boggles the mind. That authorities are looking for "what triggered the rampage" is just ridiculous. Who says there has to be a trigger? There were many, many indications that this was an extremely troubled young man, even one with violent tendencies -- and it's astonishing that even after the Columbine massacre, the signs that this kid was a danger to himself and others were right there:

Cho Seung-Hui rarely spoke to his own dormitory roommate. His teachers were so disturbed by some of his writing that they referred him to counseling. And when Mr. Cho finally and horrifyingly came to the world’s attention on Monday, he did so after writing a note that bitterly lashed out at his fellow students for what he deemed their moral decay.

[snip]

Joe Aust, who shared Room 2121 at Harper Hall with him, said he had spoken to Mr. Cho often but had received only one-word replies. Later, Mr. Aust said, Mr. Cho stopped talking to him entirely. Mr. Aust would sometimes enter the room and find Mr. Cho sitting at his desk, staring into nothingness.

[snip]

Lucinda Roy said that in October of 2005 she was contacted as head of the English Department by a professor who was disturbed by a piece of his writing. Ms. Roy, rebuffed by Mr. Cho, contacted the campus police, counseling services, student affairs and officials in her department. Ms. Roy described the writing as a “veiled threat rather than something explicit.”

University officials told her that she could drop Mr. Cho from the class. Or, they said, she could tutor him individually, and she agreed to do so three times from October to December 2005. During those sessions, she said in an interview, he always wore sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled low.

“He seemed to be crying behind his sunglasses,” she said.

[snip]

In another writing class, Mr. Cho submitted two profoundly violent and profane plays. Ian MacFarlane, a classmate who now works for America Online, posted the plays on the company’s Web site Tuesday, saying they had horrified the rest of the students.

“When we read Cho’s plays, it was like something out of a nightmare,” Mr. MacFarlane wrote. “The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn’t have even thought of.”

As a result of them, Mr. MacFarlane added, “we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter.”

In one play, called “Richard McBeef,” Mr. Cho wrote of a teenage boy who accuses his stepfather of murdering the boy’s father and of trying to molest the boy himself.

“I hate him,” the boy says of the stepfather in a copy of the play on the Web site. “Must kill Dick. Must kill Dick. Dick must die.”


Now I've been interested in psychology from childhood, and I was a depressed, lonely adolescent, covering myself up with a poncho and wearing my hair in my eyes, sitting alone in the schoolyard at lunchtime writing moody poetry into a blank book. I went to a small, very provincial college in Pennsylvania where from the day I got there I was shunned because I was short, chubby, not a prom queen, too Jewish, and just too weird. I called home in tears the first night I was there. So I know a bit about what it's like to be a troubled kid. I also work in mental health research, turning psychological assessment forms into data entry screens, so perhaps I'm just more attuned to this than most people.

But how on earth can you have a kid on campus who sits in his room staring into nothingness and writes violent plays containing revenge fantasies about child molesters, and decide that the way to handle it is to let an English teacher drop the kid from the class? And when the teacher agrees to tutor the kid and he seems to be crying all the time, how on earth can anyone, after the kid decides he can't take anymore and he'll get back at the teachers who ignored him, the kids who perhaps snubbed him because he was foreign, because he was Asian, maybe they thought him "geeky", buys some easily-accessible guns and decides to go out in a blaze of glory, taking a few of those he imagines were his tormentors with him, how can anyone say, as a federal law enforcement official did:

“What was this kid thinking about? There are no indications.”


What the fuck??? No indications? The kid practically had a big, red, Tex Avery-style neon sign pointing at his head screaming HELP ME!!

Over the next few days, we're going to see a great deal of hue and cry in the media about the "monster" who did this. Already, yesterday, a school official was using the Bush-tested "Nobody could have predicted..." line. I'm sorry, but this was a very troubled kid, not a monster. I would also like to know more about the "prescription medications related to the treatment of psychological problems" found in Cho's belongings -- what they were, who prescribed them, and what kind of ongoing monitoring of the drug's effects was going on. Given Cho's status as a loner, it's unlikely he was one of those kids passing their prescription drugs around to their friends. And while 23 years old is hardly an adolescent, it's not that far out of adolescence, and we know that the use of antidepressants can increase the likelihood of suicidal ideation in children and adolescents.

I'm not trying to excuse what Cho Seung-Hui did, although the simplistic-minded wingnuts who occasionally visit this blog are likely to brand me as a bleeding-heart, root-causes liberal. Already we have morons like Debbie Schlussel trying desperately to create a Muslim connection out of the name "Ismail Ax" written in red ink on Cho's arm and calling for stricter controls on the admission of foreign students (even though Cho had come to the U.S. with his parents at the age of 8); and Michelle Malkin, of all people, trying to allude to this sort of massacre being an Asian thing by noting the 1991 University of Iowa shootings by a Chinese doctoral student. Is it any wonder that Korean students are already fleeing the Virginia Tech campus in response to and in anticipation of sweeping generalizations about Korean males? Funny how no one talked about white kids' propensity to violence after the Columbine massacres.

It seems to me that by now we have enough information about this kid and the other school shooters that have preceded him; shooters that include plenty of white guys, to realize that while yes, there may be issues of a violent culture, and yes, there is an issue of too-easy accessibility to guns in this society, the troubled college life and death of Cho Seung-Hui -- and those other depressed high school and college students who may be ticking time bombs even as we speak -- is first and foremost a mental health issue. So can we please start paying attention when a kid like this cries out for help but doesn't know how to ask for it?

Labels:

0 comments
Bookmark and Share