Do you think that virginia Tech killer Cho Seu was an Aspie?

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I think people are looking at a "cause" when there are a multitude of factors. Bullying most likely did nothing to help the situation and could have opened the doors for the more extreme anti-social behaviors.

I didn't say it in this thread, but *I* am creative also. HECK, THREE TIMES customers wanted to patent my ideas, or told me I should. And they were ideas that WERE inobvious and novel(AKA CREATIVE and ORIGINAL)! !! One saved a multimillion dollar project, and paved the way for many others. IQ tests, that most here did well in, test some creative aspects.

BESIDES, what is the point of being considered smart, if you just regurgitate old things.

Steve

If if was a psychopath, his alienation was a decision. I think bullying for many years will make one become quite depressed, not homocidal. From what I can ascertain, he wasn't mercilessly bullied as people were afraid of him, including his college instructors.

A psychopath can look autistic:

A psychopath is defined as a person having no concerns for the feelings of others and a complete disregard for any sense of social obligation. They seem egocentric and lack insight of any sense of responsibility or consequence. Their emotions are thought to be superficial and shallow, if they exist at all. They are considered callous, manipulative, and incapable of forming lasting relationships, let alone showing any kind of meaningful love. They typically never perform any action unless they determine it can be beneficial for themselves.

Since psychopaths cause harm through their actions, it is assumed that they are not emotionally attached to the people they harm; however, according to the PCL-R Checklist, psychopaths are also careless in the way they treat themselves. They frequently fail to alter their behavior in a way that would prevent them from enduring future discomfort. Dr. Joseph Newman contends that the behavior displayed by psychopaths is the result of "an inability to process contextual cues."

If she is, she's completely redefining the word—or at least relying on an archaic definition (meaning any personality disorder). There are other personality disorders to describe people who have become withdrawn and bitter, mainly paranoid personality disorder or negativistic (passive-aggressive) personality disorder.

Cho's mention of Ishmael (Ishmail Ax), in a tattoo on his arm and in the package sent to NBC, indicates that Cho's predominant emotion was abandonment. Ishmael is a biblical figure who was abandoned to the desert to die. Look at the picture (Ishmael is the Child, Cho identified with the Child).

It appears that the source of Cho's anger was because people shunned him following two stalking incidents in 2005. He was arrested for trying to make friends, perhaps for the first time in his life. Also, Cho mentioned his imaginary friends, Jelly (KY) and Spanky (Hand), a joke by Cho that was misinterpreted by his roommates to mean was insane. Thus they ignored him, isolating him further. His autism, or other socially disabling disorder, isolated him and people reacted to his oddness and isolated him more.

Link: The Psychological Effects of Shunning


The Expulsion of Ishmael and His Mother (Cho identified with the Child)

What was he doing stalking people anyway? Stalking someone is NOT trying to make friends. I've been stalked and it didn't feel very FRIENDLY to me! I can't believe anyone is trying to justify this with a "socially disabling disorder." He was dangerously NUTS and should have been locked up a long time ago.

Looking at this and some of the other mentions of psychopathy here, it seems like the psychiatric people get to redefine the word "psychopath" in each case and somehow still seem to think that they are talking about the same critter. Maybe this is a true definition of "insane."

What are we actually talking about when we talk about people who can't process contextual clues? I was forced to endure living among a bunch of people who didn't give proper contextual clues. You can't process what isn't there or what is contrived to be misleading and inaccurate to the point of lying. People can lie with their bodies as well as with their vocal chords. A lot of them are also masters at making the victim look like the aggressor, sometimes in ways that should be pathetically obvious to anyone who has a brain and intends to use it.

How would I have failed to alter my behavior to avoid discomfort? My perpetrators deliberately made that impossible. Even total submission only got me more pain because they contrived to create the appearance of hostility on my part no matter what I did. Cho's attitude that it was all everyone else's fault may have come from painful experience that gave him no other evidence. I literally had to read about decent people for a large part of the idea that other situations might exist.

A clue for my clueless mom: Common decency is not something that you withhold and trade for a high price.

It get even more complicated because PDs are not considered insane but rather part of their make up (personality). Like a psychopath couldn't claim insanity in court. Insanity implies illness like something that is afflicted, something that may need to be monitored and controlled. Unfortunately the lines are blurred. Really you have to treat people in a way that is appropriate in each case. There are no real cure for personality. They know that dramatic changes to the brain can change behaviour (like frontal lobe damage) But they don't know enough to change someone’s personality to a desirable one. Even if it was possible is it ethical? Tough call.

No one should deny that bad life experiences are likely to lead to unhappiness; and if these experiences are horrible enough it can leave an indelible imprint on a person’s consciousness, much like the branding mark of a hot iron. But however painful it may be, even if the memory cripples and withers, does psychological trauma diminish our moral capacity to discern right from wrong? It would be a very frightening world to live in if this were true. For a person who has been lessened as a moral being is one who must accept the judgment and dictates of those who remain whole. Just as children have to listen to their parents for their own good because grown ups have better judgment. Taking the argument a step further, we will find that it is not only just, it is actually necessary for victims to become slaves of their abusers because the victim has been traumatized (and thus diminished) whereas the abuser has experienced sadistic pleasure (and thus remains whole). By casting the whole debate within the framework of psychological cause and effect, this is where we are heading. Do you really want to go there?

As a matter of disclosure, I take a very dim view towards practically all forms of psychology. The primitive axioms in psychology are inevitably rooted in myth and not necessarily good ones either. The study of the mind, especially if one intends to examine matters of mind from the perspective of ethics and politics, is best engaged from a philosophical perspective. At least then one does not pretend to know anything we cannot know.

Lines are blurred? Who knows what the lines even are?

When you see the alien as someone to be destroyed, you're fairly safe with your own kind, but once you are alienated, hell breaks loose. If you see the alien as a friend who you do not know yet, or the alienness as a source of interest or fascination, you may not be psychologically typical but you're a lot safer to live with or approach. I don't know WTH a "psychopath" is, but I do believe that some morality tells me that I should kill the alien and I can be immoral by being compassionate and loving, which makes for a crazy world, doesn't it? Morality means little to me unless it gives me an excuse to be kind. Does that make me a new kind of psychopath?

I wonder if this guy had a history of animal cruelty as a child. Many animal abusers grow up to kill people as well.

Not another ret*d " Do you think __________ was an aspie?" thread... And this is by far the most ret*d one I have seen yet.

Hi SeriousGirl, stalking is an awful experience to go through, it happened to two my friends. I’m sorry to hear that it happened to you.

Cho’s "stalking" incidents involved sending some text messages to a girl, who characterised the text messages sent as annoying, not stalking. The other incident happened when he talked to a girl on-line and later turned up at her dorm and said, "hello, I'm question mark". She ran away and was too scared to tell him to go away, so she got college to do it for her. The media sensationalised the incidents and labelled him (on the ABC website) as Stalker typed in big red dangerous looking letters.

When Cho was told what he did was wrong, he stopped. He did not repeatedly follow or harass either girl and his intention, it seems, was not to scare them. Also, Cho became very depressed after the last incident and he was committed to a mental hospital for two days, the police didn't arrest him for stalking. The police called to his dorm because his roommate thought he might commit suicide.

What happen this week was an awful tragedy, and I am not apportioning blame to an individual or person, but I am complaining about the system and mechanism of instinctive human interactions. When Cho transgressed, his roommates shunned him, they feared him, felt disgusted by him and I guess hated him as well (the human emotion of disgust is a fundamental emotion and is an easy one to predict). These reactions, that people are unable to control and are even unaware of, isolated Cho further. He was unstable to start with and shunning made his mental illness worse.

I've been through some of that before. When I was his age, when a girl bothered to tell me that I shouldn't be messing with her, when she had that much courtesy, I went away like I was supposed to. Some of them were fascinated with playing the game of luring me into whatever they could. They knew that they could get away with anything because if things got out of hand, it was the fault of that perverted crazy fellow.

A man can be accused of stalking without stalking, harassment without doing any harassment, and being violent when he does everything humanly possible to avoid violence. This is because people both lie and indulge in self-delusion. Some of them literally use it as a form of psychic attack, getting their victim's attention with a false accusation and then feeding them negative energy and hatred. I've been wiped out before by such an attack and it was totally unjustified. It's like getting a physical beating. Come on, if it is something like this girl who claims to have been freaked out, this could be a girl who's seventeen, has a two-year-old child, multiple drug habits, a sex life that should not even be described to Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, and maybe even metallic objects embedded in her unmentionable parts. Then she claims to be freaked out by the way someone looks at her, and she just might be faking, you know? That or there is a deep-seated psychological problem. I go with the idea that it's deliberate myself.

I would tell people to just try to understand and accept it. Paranoia is the worst emotion that there is, and no matter how you justify it, it's self-destructive and saps the joy from life. It also saps the joy from other people's lives. There is nothing wrong with strange and different. I even enjoy strange and different and somewhat dangerous, especially when it comes with genuine affection.

That’s kind of the question what is society which is a really interesting one. Like if you only had psychopaths would they be able to sustain humanity. Flash answer is probably not. But then again I think they would. Because they essentially wouldn’t really be psychopaths in that context. I think it would be a lot different than we have now but I think there would be enough people left over to sustain the population. We don't think of wild animals as psychopaths but some of animal behaviour is very similar if you view it in a human context.

I have my doubts about whether the current crop actually is sustaining humanity.