Have you ever been so busy on the internet going from page topage,…

If you still read these comments, how is your case going?

-alcatholic

I now believe the best role Universities can play is to seriously confront and punish aggressive/violent behavior.

Dr. Peter Breggin makes this argument against relying on the mental health profession to protect us from the Cho’s of this world. Police intervention is needed.

The more I learn about the role and limitations of psychiatrists, the less I’m convinced they could be relied upon to keep the public safe. The police and administrative enforcement of suspension or other punishments for unacceptable behavior seem much more powerful institutions for dealing with campus violence and hopefully preventing mass murder.

Dr. Peter Breggin writes:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-breggin/the-real-mental-health-l_b_46327.html

The answer to vengeful, violent people is not more mental health screening or more potent mental health interventions. Reliance on the whole range of this system from counseling to involuntary treatment failed. There is not a shred of scientific evidence that locking people up against their will or otherwise “treating” them reduces violence. As we’ll see, quite the opposite is true.

So what was needed? Police intervention. Almost certainly, the police were hampered in taking appropriate actions by being encouraged to view Cho as a potential psychiatric patient rather than as a perpetrator. It’s not politically correct to bring criminal charges against someone who is “mentally ill” and it’s not politically correct to prosecute him or to remove him from the campus. Yet that’s what was needed to protect the students. Two known episodes of stalking, setting a fire, and his threatening behavior in class should have been more than enough for the university administration to bring charges against him and to send him off campus.

Police need to be encouraged and empowered to treat potentially dangerous people more as criminals than as patients. In particular, men stalking women should be handled as definitively as any perpetrator of hate crimes. Regardless of whether the victims want to press charges, the police should. Cho shouldn’t have been allowed to get away with it a second time.

How would a police action have affected Cho? Would it have humiliated him and made him more violent? There’s no way to have certainty about this, but anyone with experience dealing with threatening people knows that a good dose of “reality,” a confrontation with the law, is much more of a wake up call and a deterrent than therapeutic coddling. Furthermore, involuntary psychiatric treatment is one of the more humiliating experiences in American society, and tends to make people more angry, not less.

Mental health interventions do not protect society because the person is almost always quickly discharged because his insurance coverage has run out or because mental health professionals, who as a group have no particular capacity to make such determinations, will decide that the patient is no longer a danger to himself or others. Indeed, in December 2005, when the university obtained a temporary detention order against Cho, a magistrate referred him for a mental health evaluation that found “his insight and judgment are normal.” Need I say more about the hazards of relying on mental health screening and evaluation to identify dangerous perpetrators–even after they have already been threatening people?

It is time to untie these hands. Autist with sadistic fantasies, agitated depression and paranoid delusions is a threat himself – he need not make any threats to justify compulsory hospitalization. He is a ticking bomb. If the system of institutionalized mental care was abused some 30 years ago, this is not a valid reason to dismantle it. Any system can be misused; it means only it needs improvement, not abolition. Psychiatry is not intended only to help ill; it the first line of society defence against dangerous psychos. This tragedy is a warning about doctrinal failure, consequence of human rights fetishism unchecked and unbalanced against valid security concerns.

Thanks for responding to my blog. I’ve posted a rather lengthy response there.

I don’t claim to know the solution to any of this, and I think society is caught in a Catch 22. On the one hand, we can’t declare someone mentally unsound and shove them off somewhere for re-education. On the other hand, if we are not willing to do that and lose our freedoms in the process, are we prostrate in the face of such mindless explosions of violence?

I don’t know. In the coming weeks, I hope people would try to look at this issue on every side and come up with sober analysis and wise decisions. But I think for the moment, we should just look at the issue and reserve judgment til later. In the meantime, we can always beef up security…

Excellent post. And I agree with you more and more as I reflect on everything. I’m glad more and more people are letting me know that they think my initial ideas were off base.

I responded on your blog.

Cheers!