Four Months After the Massacre, Lessons to Be Learned

Aug. 30, 2007 — -- In the course of 15 years as an inpatient psychiatrist in an academic hospital in Manhattan, I have hospitalized many acutely suicidal or psychotic college students and taught many more psychiatry trainees about the signs of impending suicidal and dangerous behavior.

Watching television coverage of the worst murder on a college campus in American history, I saw what my wife, Lisa, a clinical psychologist, termed an astounding lack of public knowledge about mental illness and its relationship to dangerousness. This applied mostly to the mass media, but also to college faculty and administration and to law enforcement agencies.

Usually only untreated or under-treated psychosis or mood disorders can result in violence and suicide. To the extent that it can be deduced from the public record and using only general psychiatric knowledge, Seung-Hui Cho at the time of his mass murder-suicide was acutely psychotic and had a long history of mental illness.

Although Cho's diagnosis will never be known definitively, the signs of progressive mental illness were there: He was odd as a small child, and in high school he had difficulty talking and was isolated and laughed at. By 2005 he had developed bizarre and paranoid behavior (wearing shades, whispering, latency of speech, asking students to call him a question mark). Finally, several weeks or days prior to the mass murders, his sleep had decreased at the onset of the last and fatal episode of his illness.

In all likelihood, if he were properly diagnosed and treated in 2005 or even during the week preceding his bizarre murderous rampage, he would have become one of millions of Americans who are under treatment for chronic psychiatric illness and remain perfectly nonviolent. The tragedy was that neither his family, nor his fellow students, nor the faculty recognized that Cho was mentally ill and in dire need of treatment.

Whose responsibility is it to help an acutely mentally ill student get proper help? The majority of first episodes of schizophrenia and of bipolar mood disorders occur in very young men and women of college age. Is it their responsibility to understand what is happening to them and to diagnose themselves?