Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Tech tragedy suggests no easy, cheap, solution
From the RoundTable blog
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Ray Mayberry
Mayberry is a retired psychiatrist living in Roanoke.
In regard to the June 22 news story "No drugs found in Cho's body, according to autopsy":
Seung-Hui Cho was a young male student who murdered 32 people and then himself in the Virginia Tech massacre. We usually look for drugs or some physical condition to blame for such strange, unexplained behavior.
When we don't understand abnormal behavior, we look for and expect to find simplistic answers. We seek to find a silver bullet for the explanation to satisfy our curiosities and to relieve our anxieties. Tragedies are usually much more complicated but understandable.
It was revealed that Cho's lifelong behavior was that of a disturbed person functioning at a psychotic state much of the time. Why wasn't something done about it? I would suppose that the family was not able to recognize the seriousness of his condition or was afraid of the stigma that society might attach for seeking psychiatric treatment.
Since treatment is available throughout the country, it should be applied as soon as possible to prevent continual suffering and often tragic consequences. Murder and suicide are among the top causes of death in certain age groups.
Our society persists in trying to find simple solutions to the care and treatment of the mentally ill. We have learned that locking them up, giving them many pills and other physical types of treatments have not been very effective in reducing or preventing mental disorders. Sometimes the use of some of those modalities are effective in containing symptoms in order to begin more definitive treatments.
For some reason, apparently legal, this was not done in Cho's case. However, we don't know what else might have been done. We do know that the laws governing mental illnesses are frequently obstructive for intervention for treatment.
It was pleasing to learn that the governor has taken an interest in getting some changes in the laws. I hope he and the General Assembly follow that up to provide the funds and services for the care and treatment of the mentally ill.
We must stop seeking magic bullets in the attempt to find a cause of such tragedies. For effective treatment to happen, we must provide the necessary training for competent mental health providers. That will certainly be costly, but not nearly as costly as the mayhem and destruction that we have been made aware of again from the recent tragdy at Virginia Tech.
