Swinging Pendulum

I mentioned yesterday that Cho's Creative Writing professor was so disturbed by some of his work that she tried to get him to go in for counseling. This should be no surprise; over the last forty years, one of the consequences of the deinstitutionalizaton of the mentally ill has been not the release of those who were hospitalized, but the reluctance to hospitalize those whose behavior was peculiar or worrisome.

I mentioned a few days ago the story of Joyce Brown, whose bizarre behavior living on a steam grate in New York City in 1987 led to a confrontation between Mayor Koch and the ACLU--and the ACLU won. That's by far the more common side of the problem--mentally ill people living in misery and squalor because their mental illness prevents them asking for, or accepting hospitalization and treatment. The ACLU thinks it is looking out for the dignity of people in this situation. It is a tragedy, but one largely confined to that person.

The less common side of the problem is what happens when a mentally ill person goes on a rampage. I say that this is "less common," because it really is relatively rare. But when it happens, everyone knows about. It isn't a localized piece of suffering that ends when someone dies of pneumonia or exposure, but the cause of multiple deaths.

Martin Bryant, somewhat retarded, who killed 35 people in Tasmania in 1996, after providing at least clues to his dangerousness because of his involvement in two previous suspicious deaths.

James Huberty, who killed 21 people in San Ysidro, California in 1984.

Charles Whitman, who murdered 18 people sniping from a tower at the University of Texas in 1966--and who autopsy showed had a golf-ball sized tumor in his brain, and had been receiving psychiatric treatment that didn't look for this physical cause.

Thomas Hamilton, who murdered 17 people at a school in Scotland in 1996. His unhealthy interest in little boys was well-known to the authorities; there are some reasons to wonder if Scottish police may have allowed him to have a pistol permit (not easy to get in Britain) covered up aspects of the crime to hide their involvement with Hamilton and child pornography.

Michael Ryan, who murdered 16 people in Hungerford, England in 1987.

And there are so many others, like Richard Baumhammers, who showed clear evidence of serious mental illness, or the guy who murdered my landlord's daughter in San Francisco in 1982, but no action was taken until they started killing people.

There was a time when a person who was just a little eccentric might find himself locked up in a mental hospital without reason. I mentioned O'Connor v. Donaldson (1975) a while back. Lynn Vincent and Robert Stacy McCain's Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party on pp. 181-2 describes how in 1961, a local sheriff brought prostitutes to President Kennedy's suite at the Olympic Hotel in Seattle:

Miffed that he hadn't been able to deliver the prostitutes to the president personally, the sheriff warned the hookers, who were already inside the suite: "If any word of this night gets out, I'll see that you both go to Stillicoom [a state mental hospital] and never get out."

And at the time, that was a realistic threat.

American society was too willing, not that many years ago, to lock someone up in a mental hospital on the say-so of an authority figure. But we have clearly gone too far the other direction--and the consequences of this unwillingness to hospitalize those who are deeply troubled sometimes gives a bitter and bloody harvest.

UPDATE: It now appears that Cho was hospitalized, apparently against his will, in 2005--which makes me wonder if the Brady Law background check works:

April 18, 2007 — Virginia Tech police say Seung-hui Cho was sent to a nearby mental health hospital for evaluation in December 2005, after two female schoolmates said they received threatening messages from him and school officials became concerned that he might be suicidal.

That information came to light two days after Cho, a Virginia Tech senior, killed 32 people and then himself in a shooting rampage on the university's campus.

University officials said the school had obtained a "temporary detention order" from a local magistrate that allowed them to refer Cho to an off-campus medical facility.

According to Virginia law, "A magistrate has the authority to issue a detention order upon a finding that a person is mentally ill and in need of hospitalization or treatment.

"The magistrate also must find that the person is an imminent danger to himself or others," says the guideline from Virginia's state court system.

"We normally go through access [appealing to the state's legal system for help] because they have the power to commit people if they need to be committed," said Wendell Flinchum, chief of the Virginia Tech police department.

UPDATE 2: A forensic psychiatrist concludes that Cho was schizophrenic:

What then leads you to believe Cho had schizophrenia?

How he related to his roommate was just too bizarre to be depression. The bizarre content of his plays — mashing a half-eaten "banana bar" in someone's mouth, the hypersexual, nihilistic (death obsessed) obsessions in the absence of depressive guilt or tearfulness are another clue. The progressive decline of a period of years. Those with schizophrenia, especially in their earliest years, are not readily recognizable as such — their condition is evolving. But here was someone who, as early as 2005, was carrying himself so strangely that he was a spectacle. The depressed withdraw and disappear. Those who are so peculiar in their manner so as to be inappropriate (taking cell phone pictures of his teacher, speaking inaudibly, pulling a cap low over his eyes) exhibit signs and symptoms more indicative of schizophrenia. He was communicating in a rambling manner reflective of what we appreciate as autistic thinking — characteristic of schizophrenia. In a similar vein, Mr. Cho's stilted communication in his homicide note (deceitful charlatans — not the language of a 23-year-old college kid) is also the manner of a schizophrenic's communications, as is his pronounced delay in responding to questions.

This is not surprising. A lot of schizophrenics start to show symptoms in late teens or early 20s.