Roy Huggins Says Stuff

From a report on the autopsy of Seung-Hui Cho, the gunman who committed the murders at Va. Tech:

Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho was as mysterious in death as he was in life, leaving behind few clues for medical examiners.

…

Psychologists and criminologists have suggested in recent days that Cho suffered from a mental illness, but Massello said such disorders are usually neurological or chemical in nature and unlikely to be identified during an autopsy, even if Cho’s brain had been intact.

Um. Duh?

Among all the scrambling to find someone at fault, the scramblers seem to have largely settled on gun enthusiasts and the mental health industry. I feel a desire to make some things clear:

• Putting a suicidal person on a hold and taking them to the hospital is not the same as arresting them and taking them to jail. When Cho was released it was because he was no longer highly likely to go kill himself. In other words, “he no longer appeared to be a threat to himself.”
• No one in the mental health system has a crystal ball, not even psychiatrists and psychologists. They always say “the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.”¹ Cho did not have a list of past behaviors including “shooting rampage.” Therefore, ipso facto, no one leapt to the conclusion that he would commit such an atrocity.
• Mental health workers can’t put someone away for “suspicion of being screwed up.” To be truly put away in the United States, one has to commit a crime.² I can’t imagine a judge taking too kindly to prosecutors claiming that a kid should be locked up for the long haul because “This here psychiatrist said he should.”

Of course his “mental illness” won’t show up in the autopsy. There’s no Anxiety Virus. Depression is not the result of damage to your “happy neurons.”³

Looking for some concrete, easy-to-identify sign of what was wrong with this kid and trying to figure out who screwed up won’t work. It won’t bring back the dead. It won’t heal anyone’s injuries. And it won’t do anything to stop this from happening again.

It’s absolutely horrendous what this kid did. And it’s worth spending the time and energy to see what lessons we can learn from it. But unfortunately we’ll likely never know the “why” of it, no matter how advanced and enlightened our society may be.

1. And it’s a poor one at that [↩]
2. There aren’t really even places where people suffering full-blown psychosis are “put away” anymore. In Oregon, a mental health commitment will only get you into the state hospital for up to 180 days. [↩]
3. There are, of course, neurochemical components to mood disorders. But the debate over chemistry vs. circumstance is often circular and typically results in chicken-and-egg impasses. [↩]