It wasn't surprising that recommendations to reform Virginia's mental health system won loud applause Thursday.

After all, a state study conducted this summer found that no one -- patients, families, doctors or judges -- was happy with the system. Insufficient resources, murky rules and a lack of oversight are long-standing sources of criticism.

Observers from various mental health spheres cheered the conclusion of the panel reviewing the Virginia Tech shootings: that Virginia's system "has major gaps in its entirety."

The largest group of the panel's more than 70 recommendations dealt with mental health.

"Virginia has a real opportunity here ... to provide some leadership in these issues," said Mira Signer, executive director of NAMI Virginia, the state office of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

The chapter of the report specifically on mental health includes 24 recommendations. Other chapters have more suggestions related to mental health.

The General Assembly is widely expected to take up mental health reforms in January.

The recommendations fall into five broad categories: allowing more time for evaluations and commitment hearings; lowering the threshold for involuntary commitment; giving decision-makers more complete information; clarifying the rules for involuntary outpatient orders; and revising reporting requirements related to firearms purchases.

Paul Barnett, the Montgomery County special justice who conducted Seung-Hui Cho's commitment hearing in December 2005, said recommendations that would bring more information to such proceedings are welcome.

"Wish we'd known some of this stuff in his background" during Cho's hearing, Barnett said of the biographical details contained in the report.

In what is now a well-known episode, Barnett, having only scant information, ruled that Cho was mentally ill and a danger to himself but could be treated on an outpatient basis. He released Cho with an order to get care.

The report said that Cho did keep an appointment at the university's Cook Counseling Center, but that workers there left it up to Cho whether to return. He did not.

John Snook, a staff attorney for the nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center, called it absurd that Cho could stop treatment after a court order.

He applauded the report's call to lower the threshold for compelling someone to accept treatment. Virginia's standard of "imminent danger" too often leaves families trying to get an unwilling relative into treatment with no option but "Why don't we wait a few more days and maybe he'll get more violent," Snook said.

The report says that a better threshold might be a "significant risk" of harm.

Josephine Kim, a Harvard psychologist who has written about mental health issues among Asians, wondered if Cho's fate would have been different if, after he was diagnosed with depression and "selective mutism" in high school, the school had found a therapist who spoke Korean rather than using Cho's sister as a translator to discuss Cho's case with his parents.

"It is ridiculous to think that his sister, being another child/adolescent, could have had any clear understanding of the details or even the language to communicate the full picture to her parents," Kim wrote in an e-mail.

Cho's history of special education was not relayed to Tech. "Had the parents been made fully aware of the seriousness of his conditions, I believe they would have been more proactive during his transition to college," Kim wrote.

Harvey Barker, director of New River Valley Community Services, said the recommendation to expand outpatient services is "absolutely necessary."

Right now, someone coming to his agency has a three- to five-week wait for non-emergency outpatient care, Barker said.

Staff writer Duncan Adams contributed to this report.