Commentary from the Providence Journal Bulletin

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This was a commentary from the Providence Journal that just appeared today. I knew there was a previous discussion on this discussion before But I felt this commentary was too important to simply pass up. How this would impact NT perceptions of people in the Autism/Asperger community is anyone's guess.
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Timothy Rivinus: Virginia Tech and our health priorities
TIMOTHY M. RIVINUS

BOSTON

WE CANNOT FORGIVE Sueng-Hui Cho for what he did. The slaughter of 32 innocent students and professors last April 16, extinguishing their future and the hopes of a full life, scarring permanently their families, friends, a university, Virginia Tech, and a country, was unforgivable.

But we cannot forget Cho (who killed himself after the murders) either. What of the callow young man who stares out at us from his homemade video and who seems so threatening and yet afraid, so angry yet empty and so pleading? “Couldn’t you help me?” he seems to say. His actual words are, “You loved inducing cancer in my head, terrorizing my heart and ripping my soul . . . Do you know what it feels like to be spit on your face and have trash shoved down your throat? Do you know what it feels like to dig your own grave?”

Yes, these are the final words of a soon-to-be assassin. But they are also the final words of a young man with a mortally disordered brain — a human without any sense of connection. He was irrational, impulsive, predictably unpredictable, at the end of his rope, and, in short, acutely (and as we later learned, chronically) mentally ill and probably lethal.

I read the recently published mental-health history of Mr. Cho in “Mass Shooting at Virginia Tech, April 16, 2007. Report of the Review Panel presented to Governor Kaine, Commonwealth of VA, August 2007.” It should be required reading for all Americans.

Over some 70 pages within the almost 200-page report Mr. Cho’s “mental-health” history tragically and graphically unravels. It is a history of the failure, during his short life, of a health, legal, academic and social network to diagnose, intervene and help a fellow human with a soul-destroying brain disorder.

Born in South Korea and emigrating to the U.S. at 8, Seung-Hui Cho had been a delicate child who had early communication and other social difficulties. He was the child of a hard-working immigrant family unfamiliar with what few services existed and afraid that their son’s illness might represent failure for a family intent on assimilation and success.

Although never saying so outright, the report confirmed what many of my colleagues and I had suspected: Seung-Hui Cho had Autistic Spectrum Disorder — dating from a very early age.

Neither before nor after his and his family’s arrival in the U.S. was Seung-Hui’s autistic disorder identified and treated. Without the necessary, sufficient and continuous treatment required for this disorder, individuals with severe autistic disorder often develop a compensatory psychotic world. This happened to Seung-Hui Cho.

His psychosis process was particularly apparent in his years at Virginia Tech. He became increasingly and obviously deluded, threatening and isolated. He was also a stalker. He wrote of his despair, alienation and aggressive thoughts. Then he began his final descent into desperate homicidal rage.

Professors, health-services personnel and the university administration were repeatedly at a loss about how to interpret Mr. Cho’s actions or intervene successfully. Many disconnected attempts failed during this time to help him. Repeatedly Mr. Cho fell through the many cracks in the fragmentary offerings to people with severe brain disorders. He was a solitary and sick soul.

Sueng-Hui Cho was not born to kill or with a wish to kill. Nor were these his family’s or society’s wishes for him. But, because the absence of what we already know can and does help, all within the reach of a national commitment, his tragic decent became inexorable.

There are many unfortunates such as Sueng-Hui Cho in our world. We see them; we know them; we may be one who is lucky enough to have had help.

A series of articles on the crisis in world mental “health” appeared recently in the premier British medical journal, The Lancet. The lead article announces the journal’s intention to increase its focus over the next decade on matters of bio-behavioral and bio-emotional illness.

Its author writes, “Mental health is a neglected aspect of human well-being . . . It is intimately connected with . . . global health. [But mental-health services are] inadequate, insufficient, and insufficiently distributed. [Despite the fact that] there is already a strong evidence base” for its successful prevention and treatment. The article concludes that if mental-health services were globally adequate, sufficient and widely distributed, they could reduce human suffering, crime, social and health problems greatly.

Perhaps the most severe indictment of the present world emergency comes from Mr. Cho himself when, in a plaintive moment, he speaks to his own video recorder: “You forced me into a corner and give me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands.” The moral decision to connect to and take responsibility for those who suffer from mental illnesses is, indeed, ours.

Shouldn’t we now re-examine our national health priorities regarding mental health — especially when the issue and the need for its redress were made so horrifyingly clear on that fatal morning, April 16, 2007? Shouldn’t we now make an April 16 memorial tribute that includes a new national commitment on behalf of all those suffering from mind-brain disorder?