Va. Tech Gunman — Warning Signs?

Experts Say Cho's Violent Acts Were Not Predictable

(WebMD)  Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-hui was a moody loner who took antidepressants and wrote gory fiction, news reports say. But nobody could have predicted from this that he would commit violent acts, experts tell
WebMD.

Officials have identified Cho, 23, as the gunman who Monday shot and killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus.

"When a tragedy like this happens, we want to know how to defend ourselves and our families. We are very eager to see this as a gross aberration that might have identifiable warning signs," Jeff Victoroff, M.D., tells WebMD.

But that simply isn't the case, says Victoroff, an associate professor at
the University of Southern California and an expert on human aggression and the neurobiology of violence. People like Cho have, throughout history, appeared without warning in every human culture.

"It is true that people like Mr. Cho and the Columbine shooters exhibited some aberrant behaviors that, with 20-20 hindsight, might have tipped off sensitive observers," Victoroff says. "But we don't usually attend to those warning signs because they are so common among adolescents. ... We will never be altogether safe from such people."

Unless they have previously acted violently or threatened violence, there's
simply no way to predict whether a person will commit a violent act, says
Robert Irvin, M.D., medical director of a long-term residential treatment program that is part of the Bipolar and Psychotic Disorders Program at Harvard's McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass.

"The greatest predictor of acts of violence is prior acts of violence. Lacking that, we cannot say who will be violent and who will not," Irvin
tells WebMD. "There is no reliable predictor of who or who not to avoid. Because that quiet, lonely person who is not so verbal may be very fearful
himself and the least harmful person in the world."

Mental Illness, Antidepressants, and Violence

Could the antidepressants that Cho was said to have been taking made him violent? No, Irvin says.

It's not known whether Cho was taking antidepressants under a doctor's supervision, whether he was taking the medications properly, and whether he was taking some drug other than antidepressants.

"Certainly just being on an antidepressant does not increase your risk of engaging in violence," Irvin says. "Antidepressants causing increased risk of self-harm have been talked about, but there is much more evidence to support that they are effective in treating depression. The risk of self-harm is much greater when patients are left untreated."

Might underlying depression be to blame? Probably not, Irvin says.

"People who are hopeless, who don't experience any joy or happiness,
their thoughts are far more likely to tend toward self-harm than harm to anyone else," Irvin says. "If they are moved to violence, they are far and
away more frequently the victims."

There is a form of depression — some think it a form of psychosis — which
doctors call "major depression with psychotic features." People with
this kind of depression have delusional thinking — such as believing everybody at their workplace is very clearly out to get them, perhaps by putting bugs in their offices in order to control them.

"If you are paranoid, perceiving you are threatened when you are not,
you might be prone to violence," Irvin says. "But these are people who,
if given a choice, would hurt themselves or flee before acting in an aggressive way toward others."

Victoroff agrees that paranoid individuals are more prone than others to
commit violence.

"Someone who has a grossly distorted threat-perception system is more likely to commit violent acts," he says. "Humans respond to threat by flight or by fight. Those predisposed to respond with fight who regard
innocent people all around them as terribly threatening to them, will be prone to harm those innocent people."

Even so, Victoroff says, the majority of people suffering paranoia do not
commit violent acts, so it's impossible to say whether a particular paranoid
man or woman will become violent.

We tend to think that only mentally ill people would commit horrific crimes. But this may be false reassurance, Irvin says.

"One of the reasons we try to understand this aberrant behavior in terms of an illness is that it gives us a sense we can identify these people ahead of time. But just because the act is crazy does not mean the person suffered from a defined psychiatric illness," he says. "It is an ongoing debate whether these people need to be dealt with in the criminal justice system or the mental health system."

That's because there are two basic forms of violence: sudden, impulsive acts of aggression and premeditated violent acts.

"Premeditated aggression enters the realm of pathologic sociopathy — and there is no good known treatment for sociopaths," Irvin says.

Cho's Violent Fiction

But shouldn't Cho's violent fiction have sounded an alarm? The Chicago
Tribune reports that a creative writing teacher was so disturbed by Cho's
writing assignments that she referred him to a counseling center.

The Tribune quotes a fellow student as saying that Cho wrote a play in which a boy violently suffocates his stepfather with a Rice Krispies treat.

Writing students do often write frightening things, says Carol Lee Lorenzo, an author and fiction teacher at Atlanta's Callanwolde Fine Arts Center. Where students cross the line, she says, is when they write about actual experiences.
In such cases, she says, she returns the assignment and asks the student to justify the violence in terms of the story they are telling.

In her 20 years of teaching fiction writing, Lorenzo says she's never referred a student for counseling.

"Writers reveal things in fiction that are not autobiographical, but are part of our own deep mysteries we are trying to explore," she says. "This does not mean we take these impulses all the way as our characters do. But we have to explore that, or why would anybody read anything we write?"

Perhaps Lorenzo comes close to the terrible truths behind Cho's crime when she talks about why writers describe violent acts.

"Writers are often scared of what is not spoken. So sometimes writers will work with violent things that are expressive of the deep, dark, unfulfilled emotional experience of their lives," she says. "What scares us is this: What if it does become fulfilled in real life by not being expressed in fiction?"

Perhaps this is what happened to Cho.

"We should be more scared of the potential of the human personality than of meeting a grizzly bear in the woods," Lorenzo says. "We are so capable of violence, and yet we have these wonderful controls. If you don't look down at the deep, rich, dark mysteries inside you, you are an even scarier person because it can jump up on you without warning."

[bizzzz-2009]

There was PLENTY of warning signs, people simply chose to ignore them. Just as we chose to ignore the inevitable destruction of the New Orleans levees after several prior reports, just as we chose to ignore 19 Arabs taking flying lessons. Did anybody (especially those close to her) not see Anna Nicole's OD coming...especially after her debacle at the video music awards.?
I'm not saying something bad could have been avoided. But from all the information I've heard, this kid should have been put on a list at his school and scrutinized with extra diligence. DID CAMPUS SECURITY HAVE THIS KIDS NAME?

[johnalexwood]

I don't understand how on Earth Dr Irvin can say: "Certainly just being on an antidepressant does not increase your risk of engaging in violence" for the following reason:

As long ago as 1989, www.cchr.org used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain FDA Adverse Reaction Reports on the first Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) marketed. The documents revealed that over 500 deaths had been linked to the drug and that 83 children between the ages of 4 and 18 had attempted suicide. Two children aged 5 had committed suicide and 77 experienced hostility, agitation and intentional injury. CCHR, along with medical experts, presented evidence of homicidal and suicidal drug reactions to the FDA%u2019s Psychopharmacological Drugs Advisory Committee in 1991. The panel comprised nine psychiatrists and a psychologist who ignored parents and family members%u2019 testimony about the violent and suicidal effects of the drugs.

More information given in this video: http://www.cchr.org/index.cfm/19863

The "creative writing teacher" was on TV and she was upset that Cho wore sunglasses and hat which she stated was disrespectful to her as a women. She reported him to campus police as dangerous and then she gave him private tutor lessons three times a week. She was alone with him at these lessons!

"But shouldn't Cho's violent fiction have sounded an alarm? The Chicago
Tribune reports that a creative writing teacher was so disturbed by Cho's
writing assignments that she referred him to a counseling center.

The Tribune quotes a fellow student as saying that Cho wrote a play in which a boy violently suffocates his stepfather with a Rice Krispies treat."

[bizzzz-2009]

A long time ago, there used to be this phrase "getting fired." You see kids, people used to get fired for doing a cr@ppy job at their work. It was thought long ago that people should take responsiblity for the quality of their work. Now-a-days, the only firing you hear about is on some idiotic reality hosted by Donald Trump.
Firing is now a distant memory. Because of this, people like Donald Rumsfeld as well as Charles Steger and the VT administration say, are able to keep their jobs, free from any fear of overlooking potential disasters.

The article was well written with reason and intelligence but the hype on TV will over power it. I just saw on cable TV a "psychologist" based on the shooters play of just a few sentences completely commit him as a psychopath. THE HORRIFIC MASSACRE WOULD INDICATE HIM A PSYCHOPATH BUT DISTURBING PLAYS ARE WRITTEN ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES AND IN THE REAL WORLD ON A DAILY BASIS! And if "weird" was the determining factor for determining if a college kid was dangerous, then most of them would be committed on how they look and dress and act and talk. Reality seems to disappear when tragedy strikes and is replaced by psychobabble!

It would be nice to see a evaluation of the administration of the university and police on their excuses of doing nothing to protect the students in the two and a half hour period between the first two murders and the other thirty murders!

[tejasdemo]

Unbelievable. How much more do the cops, school, and gun shop owner need to hear before they refuse to sell a gun to this kid ?

He's on medication. Cops were called. School was notified. What in the hell is wrong with everybody's judgement.

[bizzzz-2009]

How many more rabid, third world mutants do we have to deal with? Close the door Mr. Bush. Jeez, do something right in your life.

[rhs648]

The gun debate clouds the real issues. The shooter was mentally ill and everyone around him knew it. A judge had declared him incompetent. The system allowed this person to roam freely. State and Federal laws and court rulings make it very difficult to hospitalize a mentally ill person. A recent documentary on tv stated that 20 to 30 per cent of inmates are mentally ill. Yet, the authorities can not force mentally ill people to take medication. The reality is that the system failed the students. If this person was in a mental institution, the incident would not have happened. Certainly, there was fair warning. Once again, the system failed to protect the innocent

[truthbtold2]

SSRI Antidepressants can cause violence in some people. When are we going to make this more of an issue. This is really sad that nobody is blaming the drugs. SSRI actually causes chemical imbalance rather than "fixing" the chemical imbalance in some people. And there is not a test to prove if anyone is chemically imbalanced, so they have no idea if someone will go nuts on these drugs and cause mass murder or trouble. I myself have taken SSRI, and I became suicidal and very violent, luckily I came of the drug, and now I am fine. and let me clarify that I was never violent nor suicidal before SSRI. These doctor or "professionals" have never taken SSRI themselves, so they have no clue what they are talking about other than just theory talk that they read from a textbook or medical literature and the pharmaceutical companies do a good job covering up these adverse effects of the drugs.

here is a link to a site that seemed to have collected all the violence caused by SSRI

http://www.ssristories.com/index.php

[kaede04]

No one sees the pattern???
School shooters:
Eric and Dylan (Columbine)
John Weise (Red Lake)
Carl Roberts (amish shootings)
Kimveer Gill (Montreal)
Michael Carneal(Kentucky)
Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson (Arkansas)
Kip Kinkle (Oregon)
and now Cho Sueng, were all on antidepressants.

[unclebowwow]

I am seriously challenging Dr. Irvin credibility on this matter. He is adult psychiatrist, not adolescent. Moreover, he didn't have any decent scientific publications on this matter (check PubMed if you wish). He should not have told what he is not completely competent of. Even if you are in Harvard, doesn't make you a wise person automatically. And if you still have any doubt, look at the BLACK BOX WARNING posted on any antidepressant drugs. You'll see yourslef. And you'll know what to do.