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Virginia Tech

April 21st, 2007 | View Comments

I’ve been struggling for the better part of the week to find words to describe my jumble of emotions about the Virginia Tech tragedy.

Sorrow, grief, sympathy, and prayer for the lives lost and their families. Nine of the victims were graduate students, most from the engineering class that was hit first. My heart goes out to everybody affected by this tragedy.

Not quite fear, but certainly a heightened anxiety as I went about my normal routine. It’s really hard to pay attention to a lecture on the summation of synaptic input after you realize that, with your front-row seat directly in front of the only entrance into the lecture hall, you’d be the first to be hit if a crazed gunman walked through the door. The bomb squad was called to campus.

Annoyance at all the people rushing to politicize the situation. The entire gun control debate would greatly benefit from less knee-jerk emotion and sloganeering and more cold, hard, critical analysis of the available data. However, regardless of how you feel about an individual’s right to bear arms, it seems obvious that we should not be selling guns to people who have been declared an imminent danger to himself or others and have not had adequate treatment or a follow-up evaluation. This, apparently, is federal law. So why was he allowed to buy not one, but two guns?

Concern that what I see as the real issue here—mental health—isn’t getting enough attention. Finally, a Washington post article begins to address the issue:

Kim Yang Soon, a great-aunt in Korea, said Cho’s mother told her the boy had autism*. After the family immigrated to the United States in 1992, when Cho was 8, Kim would call his mother and ask how the boy was doing. “She only talked about her daughter,” Kim said. “We knew something was wrong.”

Because Cho did well in school, his mother did not seem very determined to get treatment for him, Kim added.

And later on…

Cho’s isolation as a youth may have been exacerbated by the strains of the Korean immigrant life, sociologists said. Parents, working one or two jobs to provide for their families, often have little time to spend with their children, let alone have meaningful talks with them. Cultural stigmas make it difficult to deal with the mental illness or emotional stress of a child.

“Korean immigrants would feel shame,” said Sang Lee, director of the Asian American Program at Princeton Theological Seminary. “There would be some reluctance and some hesitancy in admitting [a mental illness] and openly seeing a doctor.”

Josephine Kim, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said the Korean American community should not feel responsible for an incident it had nothing to do with. Instead, it should reexamine how it addresses mental health issues, she said.

“Here is this person at Virginia Tech who may have been an adult academically, but emotionally and socially, he’s clearly a child who’s been stunted,” said Kim, who is also a licensed mental health professional. “He didn’t know how to deal with people. He lived in pure isolation.”

And this, I think, is the crux of the issue for American society and for Asian immigrants in particular. So many do not understand the importance of healthy psychosocial development and are reluctant or actively refuse to face mental health issues head-on, instead trying to hide behind the facade that these are merely personality quirks or immutable character flaws. They’re not.

Cho should have been referred to professionals, not in 2005, but in 1995 or earlier. Good academic performance does not necessarily mean someone is psychologically healthy. Furthermore, academic performance means nothing if an individual cannot function in society. In an alternate universe in which Cho’s problems stopped with social integration and did not extend to homicidal rage, how was he going to find a job? Who would hire someone who doesn’t make eye contact or respond when spoken to?

Most people would not hesitate to seek professional medical help for chronic physical pain. Most people would encourage friends and family experiencing such pain to seek help. Why do so many avoid doing the exact same thing for mental and emotional pain? Many mental disorders are potentially fatal. If you or someone you know is struggling with depression or anxiety or anything else, please try to get help.

—–

*Because this statement seems to be the cause of a nice flamewar on WaPo, I feel compelled to add an additional comment. Now, I have no idea if Cho was really autistic or not; no doctor has come forward claiming to have made such a diagnosis. And even if he was, autism doesn’t turn people into mass murderers.

However, it’s not unfathomable the social isolation induced by unmanaged autism could interact with other disorders or other factors to produce the result we got. The point remains the same: people with these sorts of behaviors need to be referred to professionals for treatment and society needs to stop attaching a stigma to getting help.

Yvonne posted this on April 21st, 2007 @ 7:39pm in News/Politics, Psychology/Neuroscience | Permalink to "Virginia Tech"

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