Candy and I are both sick at heart over the shootings at Virginia Tech, and want to be clear that the following dialogue in no way represents a defense of the actions taken by the person who committed these crimes. Our focus is not on defending this individual in any way, but to examine the examination, so to speak, of writing: can fiction in and of itself be used as an accurate barometer of whether someone is terribly, terribly disturbed, before any action is taken?
As I was compiling this entry, NBC News released information that the murderer sent a manifesto and video documentation explaining his actions. This is not the writing we’re talking about in the following entry; we’re discussing the examination of the fiction written in class by Cho Seung-Hui as discussed in this CNN article.
Sarah: Here’s the thought I’m trying to figure out, and hence I’m asking your reaction:
In the news today regarding the shooter at Virginia Tech, who pretty much personified from all accounts a sociopathic disregard for humanity, there’s been a lot of discussion of how violent, dark, and disturbing his writing was. His English professor removed him from class and taught him one-on-one, but my understanding was that he was taking inappropriate pictures of people using his cell phone from under his desk and that his behavior was upsetting the professor and other students.
But the newspaper and CNN repeatedly mention that his creative writing was violent and disturbing. Excerpts have been posted online for our collective appraisal.
That fixation rubs me the wrong way – like any and all violent writing is now suspect, and the fact that this disturbed person’s writing revolved around violent themes was some kind of large foretelling sign that he was going to snap and murder 32 people in three hours’ time.
I know there’s a desperate search for some answer as to why someone would do something so horrible and depraved, but I don’t think that there is an answer. Clearly a LOT of little episodes in 20/20 hindsight add up to a really fucked up person and potentially a few times where one might have intervened, from stalking behavior and illicit photography to disturbing online postings. But is it really the simplest and most verifiable answer to say, “Oh, well, he wrote about killing people and therefore we all should have known that he was a disturbed individual on the brink of massacre.”
It’s way too early to figure out what could have or should have happened. But read below – the grasping at any and every shred of oddity and the focus on the writing is really bugging the shit out of me. I’m not trying to defend this individual – if he were still alive I’d line up to do him serious harm – but the attention paid to every line written by this person strikes me as quick and grasping.
Check out below the excerpts from an article from CNN – and if you think I’m talking out my ass, please say so.
Classmates and a professor say writings by Cho Seung-Hui, an English major accused of the Virginia Tech killing spree, were so disturbing that they felt he needed help.
Lucinda Roy, the former chairwoman of the English Department, told CNN that one of Cho’s creative writing professors brought his writings to her attention.
Roy was so disturbed by them she went to the police and counselors “and everywhere else, and they would say, but there’s nothing explicit here. He’s not actually saying he’s going to kill someone.”
“The threats seemed to be underneath the surface,” she said. “They were not explicit and that was the difficulty the police had.”
“My argument was that he seemed so disturbed that we needed to do something about this,” Roy said.
In one of Cho’s plays, titled “Richard McBeef,” a teenage character named John accuses his stepfather of molesting him and of killing his father.
In one scene, John throws darts at a picture of his stepfather and rants: “I hate him. Must kill Dick. Must kill Dick. Dick must die.”
At the end of the play, John tries to choke his stepfather with a “half-eaten banana cereal bar.” Instead, his stepfather, “out of sheer desecrated hurt and anger,” according to the stage directions, “lifts his large arms and swings a deadly blow at the 13-year-old boy.”
Full of scatological references and profane rants, Cho’s writing disturbed his classmates, according to Stephanie Derry, a senior English major at Virginia Tech who took a playwriting class with Cho.
“His writing, the plays, were really morbid and grotesque,” she told the Virginia Tech campus newspaper, The Collegiate.
Candy: HOLY SHIT total bitch mind-meld. That struck me too, this morning, and I was in the process of sorting out my thoughts about it so I could post a long ranty thing elsewhere. Yes, I’ve noticed the coverage on CNN and on Wikipedia, and how they’re using all this marvellous hindsight to point to all these “warning signs” that Cho was a homicidal maniac.
Look: many people have morbid imaginations. You want to talk sick, wrong imaginations? When I was a child, I used to think up and write horror stories all the time. Some of them involved thinly-disguised people I didn’t like biting it in particularly nasty ways. Some of these people were even family members and classmates. Nowadays, I still enjoy coming up with and writing really violent fiction, but I’ve completely outgrown my need to take out my resentment and aggression on real-life people disguised in a fictional setting. I did what I did back then as a proxy for agency, which is no longer quite the problem for me as a 29-year-old the way it was when I was 9. Once I had more power over my life and the directions I wanted it to go, I didn’t need to resort to fiction.
Here’s the key point: fiction provides a safe haven for lashing out. Teenagers are especially notorious for coming up with violent, tragic stories and poems, and there’s a good reason for that.
All of this is a long-winded way to say: Cho’s writing did not provide anything even close to reliable indicators of what awaited the students and professors at Virginia Tech on Monday. The vast majority of people who come up with terribly-written blood-drenched pieces of work don’t go on to become mass murderers. If that were the case, writers like Shawn Hutson (talk about awful, violent, and pointlessly bloody) would’ve gone to jail ages ago.
The connections CNN and other news outlets are trying to make between Cho’s work and his killing rampage make me squirm like an earthworm a hot sidewalk because the implication seems to be “let’s look into somebody’s fantasy lives and attempt to convict them BEFORE they do anything.” In fact, it’s distinctly Minority Report-ish, only instead of the Department of Pre-Crime, it’s the Department for the Analysis of Poorly-Written Angst-Ridden Fiction.
I have a bad, bad feeling that overzealous administrators will seize on this completely meaningless indicator and start scrutinizing students’ work for so-called danger signs. Yes, Cho wrote a lot of disturbing, violent fiction. That’s not indicative of his homicidal rage. Other things, like the stalking complaints, were probably better (but not by ANY means conclusive) indicators. About all you can say about his violent work is that he was an immature, angsty 23-year-old dude, and wrote like one.
Sarah: Not only is there a tone of “Let’s look into people’s fantasy lives and stop them before they do anything,” but also a judgmental tone of, “Anyone who writes this kind of thing is seriously disturbed.”
Is it even appropriate to scrutinze and hold up as The Example of Badness portions of this person’s writing? Does that mean I have to fear my own brain for coming up with horror? Is James Patterson going to see a dip in sales? Hardly!
The truth is, societally, right now, we LOVE being scared. The American movie going public, if the crop of new releases are used as a barometer, LOVES to have the shit scared out of it in a controlled venue. I’m not saying that Cho was writing a screenplay with an aim to sell it, but writing a screenplay that’s violent and horror-filled when, hell, 4 out of 8 theatres have the same thing showing in them is not a leap. It’s a reflection of the culture at present, especially youth culture.
I agree that the tone of the reporting lends easily to “And therefore you should flip your shit should anyone you know be writing violent fiction!”
No, you should flip your shit when someone stalks girls on campus and exhibits sociopathic behavior.
Can this kind of event ever be predicted? My sad answer is, probably not. It’s happened too many times now, with increased frequency and number of victims, and those attacks that have been stopped haven’t been halted because someone wrote violent fanfic or a creepy short story full of angst. They were stopped because the potential perpetrator made a deliberate and direct threat and someone took it seriously.
Candy: The way they harp on his bad writing as some sort of indicator that he was about to become a mass-murderer bothers me, too. Like I said, if we want to use these markers as indicators of homicidal tendencies, then we need to start culling the herd of bad horror writers, stat.
I agree that monitoring for sociopathic behaviors and taking stalking claims more seriously may go some ways towards catching this sort of thing on time, but like you, I think it’s hopeless. There are far too many factors that lead to killers snapping, and I don’t think there’s any way we can monitor those factors without destroying civil liberties for the rest of us.
Sarah: There are far too many other factors, you’re right. And moreover, the articles that discuss any disturbing themes in Cho’s writing also mention that the individual himself had antisocial tendencies in personal interaction that disturbed classmates and teachers. But again and again the stories on CNN, Wikipedia, et al, focus on the content of the writing, instead of the conduct of the individual.
Thank you very much for this post. I’ve been thinking the exact same thing since the first report about his writing. What comes out in someone’s fiction does not always reflect what’s going on in his or her psyche; it cannot and should not be used as an indicator for violent tendencies in that person’s personality.
There’s a perfectly understandable need to assign blame in this situation, and in hindsight, this guy was obviously suffering from serious mental problems. But using someone’s fiction as a warning sign… that’s a scary precedent to set.
Thank you for this. I’ve written some damn disturbing pieces in my time—and very recently, was working on something involving a school shooter. Talk about a Cassandra complex.
I submitted a horror story to my campus literary contest this year. It focused on a character who found her sister murdered; in a fit of vengeful rage, said character killed the killer. If it had any chance of winning or placing, that chance is gone. Understandable, I suppose.
But I worry. I worry because I’ve been battling mental health issues for a long time and am on record as once having tended toward self-harm. As recently as January, I was taken to the ER on a mental health arrest. What does that say about me? Are they going to target me next?
My creative efforts, by nature, have dark twists. Romances are never conventional. Violence happens. I express what I see in my nightmares. I take readers’ perceptions of normal and twist. I don’t see how this makes me a psychopath, and I certainly won’t stop writing what comes naturally.
A piece of violent writing does not a deranged man make—nor should it define him. There’s something deeper going on, as there was with the shooter. I fear the possibility that this will be lost in society’s hurry to look like a winner in the oh-we’re-so-sorry games.
I also worried this could set a precedent in the way these graphic works of fiction are viewed, especially on college campuses and high schools. I am not a huge reader of horror, but I do like Stephen King. He writes some pretty gruesome and violent stuff but is by all accounts a fine, upstanding citizen and family man.
I think is is very easy to look back and say “We should have known” but in truth, we never do. I hate to admit that there used to be a man I worked with who was a strange, loner, anti-social type and several of us used to say, “Well if anyone is gonna loose it and shoot up the place, it’s him.” It was sort of an unfunny joke to cover our discomfort about this guy. Yes, it was horribly inappropriate, but
I doubt I am the only one here who has said something like that. How many of us have used the word “postal?”
It sounds like those who were aware of his problems did everything they could do. I understand the need to assign blame and seek reasons for something so senseless but I agree with what Sarah said. There is, sadly, probably nothing we can do to prevent this happening again. No one ever really thinks this will happen to them. Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of us are right. My prayers go out to the families of those who were wrong.
I hadn’t seen the coverage about his writing when I chatted with Annie Dean about this. I said the shootings would be blamed on what music he listened to. Oh, how silly of me! That was Columbine. Old news. But the pattern in the media is sensationally familiar.
I agree with Havoc. I wrote some unpleasent horror pieces for a creative writing class. In real life though, I’m pretty non-violent.
As I understand it, this guy was generally discribed as weird. In what he wrote, amongst other things. I’m not sure how often CNN has hung out at a collge campus lately, but a lot of people in college are weird. I’m not sure why someone always has to be held responsible for not seeing something like this coming.
I do have to wonder why he would be allowed to attend the school after he’s proven to be unstable enough that he can’t take classes with other students.
There’s already concerns about violent fiction. I understand the FCC’s latest push is against violent programs on TV. I guess they have one more bit of evidence to add to the list. Even though, this is clearly Marilyn Manson’s fault.
Thank you for addressing this. It’s been in my mind ever since the creative writing angle popped up in the news.
Even now, after reading your thoughful responses, I still can’t seem to articulate how profoundly *wrong* this all seems.
On the other hand, I have to wonder if these stories aren’t worse than we are imagining. It doesn’t justify the reaction the public has had towards them, but I know very few teachers who would be so disturbed by a student’s writing as to actually go to the authorities. I’m not sure I’d do it, unless there was something so profoundly off about them that I was positive there would trouble on the horizon.
I had not seen the writing but I had read where he had been pulled up on a mental hygiene warrant or whatever it is called in VA. I would like to know more about this before looking at his writings. This would mean that he should have at least had a psychological assessment of some minimal nature.
If he was not held for 30 days it pretty much means that he was found not to be a danger to self and others. The reporting about this though is sketchy so I don’t understand for certain what happened.
Found some more:
I noticed this myself. I was listening to the radio after reading some of the excerpts from the plays he wrote. The radio personality claimed that the plays showed his hatred of mothers and teachers. I snorted and said, “Yeah, and child molesters!” But I guess nobody cares if he hated child molesters, because its socially acceptable to hate them.
But, it’s true. If writing stories with scenes of torture, killing, profanity and ye gods, bad writing, was an indicator of going off and killing people, I’d have been put away long ago. I have written horror scenes and stories that made people squirm (heck, I’ve also done that at the gaming table, playing RPGs!) Writing a scene of a character falling into a pit of garbage, with bugs crawling all over him, seeking to enter every orifice on his body… that gets a strong reaction.
The other thing that disgusts me about the whole Virginia State Shooting, is that it is deemed less horrible than a recent incident in Iraq, where a suicide bomber took out 180 people. And stuff worse than the shooting in Virginia goes on every day in Iraq. Don’t get me wrong… I feel sorry for the families of the people who died at Virginia State, but shouldn’t we also have compassion for the people in Iraq?
Less horrible. I meant, more horrible. Whups!
I’ve seen reports, though, that a writing class was so disturbed by him that many students stopped coming and said it was because they were afraid of Cho. Also that Nikki Giovanni, who was teaching there, told administrators she could not teach him anymore because he disturbed her. (Some of this is from NPR but the students not coming to class story is from the blogosphere, so who knows.)
English teachers see all sorts of disturbing themes tackled by students, and very rarely feel so personally threatened that they choose not to teach them. I was in an undergraduate workshop where every week there was at least one story where everybody died. It was boring, but not scary. Nobody rushed the writers off to therapy, though I think we might have gladly fed at least one of them a Prozac martini.
So you might see a temporary distaste for those themes, which is unlucky for people writing stuff like that this semester, but I bet it will wear off quickly. Quicker than the metal detectors and whatever other security measures go up on campuses now.
He was a young adult – he liked writing scary stuff – that sounds pretty normal to me.
He stalked a girl, was antisocial, and did weird stuff like take photos of people from under desks – these things were a cause for concern.
But really, what could anyone do until he had committed a big crime – he was still a citizen of a democracy – he still had civil rights.
Hindsight can be a bit unfair on the people whose actions (or lack thereof) preceding the incident are now being scrutinized.
“The problem is we are programming these people as a society. You cannot tell me – common sense tells you – that if these people are playing video games where they’re on a mass killing spree in a video game, it’s glamorized on the big screen, it’s become part of the fiber of our society. You take that and mix it with a psychopath, a sociopath, or someone suffering from mental illness, add in a dose of rage, the suggestability is just too high. And we’re going to have to start dealing with that. We’re going to have to start addressing those issues and recognizing that the mass murderers of tomorrow are the children of today that are being programmed with this massive violence overdose.†– Dr. Phil Speaking On Larry King Live
Thank you Dr. Phil! But I think the issue is that no one is programming anything or even really bothering to notice much even their own kids. See, everyone goes for the easy answer or the scary “not well understood” thing to blame instead of actually looking at the facts. Including dear clown Dr. Phil
Did anyone say the killer actually played video games? Nah, Dr. Phil as we well know is just another idiot talking head amongst hundreds with some agenda related to assuring people selfishly concerned that the little monsters they are raising are “normal”.
Nope, even though Bobby owns a small arsenal he would never do anything like that because we don’t let him play those demon video games or write. Nah, Bobby can barely spell his name.
Notice not one article mentioning a dang thing about being a better parent is involved… Nope, it’s heartless and cruel to blame anything simple like parental neglect or callous disregard of the monster on the parents.
The parents of the Columbine shooters didn’t know their kids were collecting weapons and building bombs in their bedrooms and garages. But man they knew all about those killer video games.
After everyone gets done reading all the scary stories this guy wrote or giving us their views on video games maybe they might start looking at the problems at home and what the parents failed to notice.
Sorry for being off topic but that’s my thoughts here.
But, to be fair, at the age of 23, your formative years are well and truly behind you. And that’s also why it would have been so very difficult to involuntarily commit the guy. He was a legal adult. He hadn’t hurt anyone or specifically threatened anyone up until the morning he started shooting. The police can’t arrest people (currently) for possible future crimes.
My husband has a friend (who is, admittedly, an idiot) who always asks if he (my husband) is ever “worried” or “scared” because I watch stuff like CSI or Foresnic Files. Or because I read mysteries and horror novels. We both think that’s a ridiculous question, because a person’s choice of entertainment, and that includes creative writing, is just not indicative of what they’re going to go out and do tomorrow. Tonight I watch Forensic Files. Tomorrow I do laundry and clean cat vomit out of the carpet. I don’t see any causal link at all there. Unless Forensic Files is nauseating my cat, and she doesn’t seem that into it.
I know people look for answers at times like this, but the crappy fact is that, sometimes, there just isn’t an answer. Was his brain chemistry screwy? Was this incident encoded in a DNA glitch somewhere? Did someone hurt him as a child, setting him on a destructive path? Or was it a random, unknowable combination of all or none of the above?
There’s no answer, and that means we can’t all feel safe, knowing that there’s a specific formula out there that says (a + b + writing horror stuff + playing video games) / (listening to metal music * listening to rap music) = someday he’ll kill a bunch of people and himself. It just doesn’t work that way.
Teddy, that’s a good point about the parenting and home-life. We have no idea what the situation was there, and it certainly could have been dire. However, I would just like to say that one does not have to grow up in a horrible household to have a psychosis or to be anti-social. Somethings are just results of brain-chemistry or genetics. Sometimes, you can be the best, kindest parent in the world and end up with a child who is a monster as an adult. It’s terrifying, it’s unfair, but there it is.
By the same token, and thank god for this, you can grow up in the most horrible home imaginable and still grow up to be a good person. You might have some hang ups and baggage but you can still be a good humane being.
The sad thing here is that honestly all of these young man’s problems were internal, mental issues and no video game, music, bad writing or movie was to blame. And maybe not even his parents.
If the media wants to talk about indicators, there are definitely better ones out there than Cho’s fiction. There’s his history of stalking, for example, or his disruption of his English class. I personally find Cho’s writing less disturbing than the fact that he was allowed to remain at Virginia Tech after multiple people reported him to the police as a stalker.
The thing I find interesting about Cho’s writing is that so many people had such a strong reaction to it at the time. Like some people here have mentioned, it’s highly unusual for a professor to be disturbed enough by a student’s writing to actually report it, and probably even more unusual for the department head to then actually report it to the police. Then you have Cho’s classmates, who all seemed to have a similar negative reaction to his plays at the time and can clearly remember how they felt about them a year later. A lot of college kids are weird and say and write dark things, but most of them don’t inspire those kinds of reactions in their professors and classmates. I do think that these reactions might be less about the actual content of Cho’s plays and more about some sort of threatening or disturbed vibe Cho himself was giving off.
The bottom line in all of this is that people are looking for answers to help them cope with a tragedy. But looking to someone’s fictional writing to predict or explain their behavior just isn’t the way to go about it.
From the Dean’s Desk:
My dears, you now need to bow to the actual knowledge The Dean has of college administrators as the The Dean is obviously a college administrator. There will never be better defenders of the rights of academic freedom than colleges. That’s what the ivory towers are for—so there is a safe place for students to have ideas and be challenged by ideas and to express themselves. But at the same time there is a duty of care owed by educational institutions to the students, faculty and staff who make up the institutions. Educational institutions are not bricks, mortar, equipment—they are the people who come together in the spirit of what is educational enterprise—where inquiry is pushed forward.
For those who like The Dean have devoted much of their professional careers to creating and sustaining environments of inquiry, the deaths of the students and faculty are deaths of our students and our faculty. The time is not to second guess, to project, to rehash the might have beens. Now is the time of mourning. And then we breathe deeply, look to each other and to our students and colleagues, and remember to value each other. Be safe my dears because we now need to live more fully, be stronger yet kinder, to remember and honor those who gave up all future. We have that duty now to those who died to pick up the promise of their lives and realize that promise for them and for those left behind.
Be good to each other and be safe my dears.
The Dean
I think the guy was probably giving off some eerie vibes in class, and when the students read his work, well, it only emphasized the feeling. There’s a bizarre immaturity to the little bit I’ve read that makes me think his emotional developmest was stunted at adolescence, maybe earlier. And part of me thinks that someone who feels so strongly about child molesters that they write a disturbing play about them for school, might have some personal experience of them.
I’ve long thought that, in the eye of the killer, murder-suicides of this sort are less about the murder and more about the suicide. That the murders leading up to the suicide are just a way of really committing to the final act. Because once you’ve gone on a rampage and killed a bunch of people, it’s a pretty safe bet you’re not going to live through it, one way or another.
The Hills Have Eyes.
Saw.
Turistas.
I don’t want to ban or censor or even blame these movies, but if we’re using fiction as a standard to predict sociopathic, homicidal behavior, we could do worse than to incarcerate the guys who wrote them.
I agree it must be a combination. I’ve read and written some dark, violent shit, but I hope my generally sunny affect doesn’t creep people out enough to think I might actually be a homicidal maniac (although, people said Ed Gein was a great babysitter, so who can tell?)
What I find interesting is that while tragic events like this always lead to huge debates over gun control, nobody ever seems to want to really start examining our mental health care. Tis young man was sent to a hospital because a judge felt he was dangerous and disturbed, and a doctor then believed him when he said he wasn’t really suicidal and let him go. How many times do we have to see this pattern before “He said he felt better” stops being accepted?
And I think the stuff about violent games is bullshit, personally. Life one or two hundred years ago was far more violent, children saw death all the time from accidents or illness or whatever. They worked on farms and killed animals for food. Thousands of kids play violent games and don’t go on shooting sprees. The difference is, the kids who don’t go on sprees either have a more secure home and are taught to value human life; or maybe they don’t have organic mental disorders as this young man had.
~I do think that these reactions might be less about the actual content of Cho’s plays and more about some sort of threatening or disturbed vibe Cho himself was giving off.~
This is my thought as well. Something about him spooked people enough for him to be reported. I think he could’ve written about pretty daisies blooming sunnily in May, and he still would have spooked people.
Nora
Hmm… This is interesting. There have been violent stories since forever. Remember all those Grimm’s Fairy Tales? People just seem to like violent stories and there are people who like to write them. So, should Random House do psychological tests on their authors before publishing them? Or how about the writers of “Saw” (eww!)? I don’t think so. But if you are going to brand the writings of a psychopath as a symptom of a deranged mind then what about Stephen King?
Of course, after a tradegy people want to find some reason for it and his writing would be an obvious target. And of course, the media will take the worst of it and post it all over the news. But you could take a passage from any horror novel and think “What a sick son-of-a-bitch!” and maybe that SOB is the blond mom of 4 next door!
The guy had a lot more issues than his writing.
I think more about this now after recently reading “Lolita.” What a messed up novel but so beautifully written! Nabokov was a family man who collected butterflies. There are no reports of him kidnapping twelve year olds and making them his sex slaves. But if he had, then everyone would have said, “Well, obviously. Look what he wrote!”
I worked in an inpatient chemical addictions facility once, and we had a sociopath patient. You can tell when someone is a sociopath. It was nothing he ever said or did, or even the nasty things he drew in art therapy (and they were nasty) that told you, but there was something *off* in the way he looked at you (or didn’t.)
I think it’s a throwback instinct, back from when humans were significantly lower on the food chain. You know when you’re being evaluated as prey, and it’s creepy as all hell. There was something about his eyes and his affect was off—not completely, just enough to let you know that he was faking it.
That’s what everyone in that classroom was reacting to, and I bet that people in his non-writing classes noticed the same thing. The writings just enhanced it, made him more overtly threatening.
Just fyi, there was a short piece in The Guardian today about this issue.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,2060413,00.html
1. I agree. This is not even the most disturbing writing I’ve ever read. Stephen King? Or how about the screenplay for Requiem for a Dream? Or the Clockwork Orange? Even Shakespeare had plays with violence, death, vengeance, and other “disturbing” themes. And yet none of these authors ever killed anyone…
2. I also was bothered about how they said the fact that he didn’t want to talk to anyone was some kind of sign. I’m a shy person and often don’t reach out to people in classes. Besides that, I’m not in school to make friends. I’m there to get a degree and to learn. So now, what? People are going to assume that I am going to come in and kill people just because I don’t talk alot?
3. I found the information about past psychological problems to be much more indicative of the problem, but that was glossed over in favor of his writing themes.
I understand the need to place blame, to ask why, and try to understand. But I think most of the answers are obvious from the crime: this was a disturbed individual and no reason is ever going to be satisfaactory.
If this is the arguement then we would have to have Stephen King taken away in handcuffs and Agatha Christien hung in effigy. I dispise Monday morning quaterbacking… and most of all, I freaking hate the fact that the killer is the top story and that the 32 victims and their loved ones are lost in the talking heads of the media.
When I was fourteen, I wrote a short story in which a housecat stalked and murdered a three-year-old boy. It won a national prize. It also won me a bi-weekly trip to the guidance counselor’s office for the remainder of the school year to discuss my “anger issues.” Talk about having a stifling effect on one’s creativity…
There are artists who create work around violent themes, and then there are the bugfuck insane. Sometimes the two groups overlap.
My profession involves working in a psychiatric hospital with a large forensics unit. I’m not an expert by no means, but my personal, familial and now professional experiences give me some (tiny) insight.
Anyhow, the law is that unless you say “I’m going to kill myself!” or “I’m going to kill YOU!”, a person can’t be involuntarily admitted to a hospital. They have to actually do or say something witnessed by others that can be documented as threatening.
Cho, while creepy, never crossed that line.
It does sound like he was exhibiting psychotic behaviors, BUT he didn’t say or do anything that warranted being admitted to a hospital long term. And most of the time, and I do mean MOST of the time….These types harm themselves first. You just don’t know.
His writing, while very bad (BTW, most of what I’m hearing is “I have kids in Jr. High that write better than that!”), in a stand alone situation is just that….dark and bad. However, I’ve seen charts full of this kind of writing with other documented actions and behaviors. I guess what I’m saying it’s in context of the illness and history of that person.
Cho’s writing doesn’t damn him. His writing, in context of his history, behaviors and overall affect does.
I’m not going to armchair dx Cho. He was clearing mentally ill, and clearly sociopathic at the end. Why? Don’t have a clue.
That is life. Things happen and well, there isn’t always a reason or a cause. Blame can’t be found.
I have always thought of writing as a healthy way of dealing with deeper feelings. It seems more likely to me that Cho might have snapped even earlier if he had not had writing as an outlet.
There is no perfect way to understand or diagnose sociopathic personalities. More often than not, people will say, “he seemed so normal.” No one saw Ted Bundy coming, Gary Leon Ridgway lived next door for years, I could go on and on. On the other side, what about Edgar Allen Poe? He had every reason to be a sociopath and yet, he never killed anyone except, perhaps, himself.
Right after they identified Cho, I heard a report that he was constantly listening to his favorite song, “Shine” by Collective Soul. I snorted to myself and thought, “so much for the Heavy Metal/Rap angle. They are just going to have to find something else to blame it on.” Prophetic I suppose.
We are a culture of answers and information. We hate the “well, ya just don’t know!” response. In this case, yeah, he had some clear markers.
BUT, thats like saying he was on I-95 heading north. There were 100’s of exits he could have taken. Some benign, some leading to help, some self-destructive and well, some leading to what happened.
Yes, he clearly was mentally ill well before the incident, yet the degree and outcome wasn’t evident. His writing was just a symptom in a broad sense, but not the whole picture.
I read a comment by someone at my school saying “He’s an English major—I understand that. We read about violence, death, grief…” I could sneer at someone who is not an English major saying that English majors are all emo crazies who are about to snap at any time, but someone who is? I was dumbfounded.
As if everything we read we must put into practice. As if in the study of violent literature, we have ever learned that not only should we mimic violence, but that it’s the right thing to do. What English majors spend 4 years learning is critical thinking, not mimicry. Most people aren’t going to think that violent creative writing is an indication of a serious problem because most people who write violent fiction *do not exhibit violent behavior in reality.* If he were a chemistry major devising formulas for poisonous or explosive tinctures, would anybody have said anything in first place?
Najida, I want to make clear that I don’t blame the doctor who released him. I blame (in part) a system by which one doctor’s opinion is enough to release him.
I just think we need to re-evaluate our mental health care…not that doctors who missed a sign or for whom a sign wasn’t there should be burned at the stake.
There aren’t any easy answers as far as where civil rights end as far as this sort of thing goes…but I do find it interesting that everyone talks about TV, music, and video games, and nobody want to really talk about what options there are to help these doctors do their jobs better.
We crave meaning to tragedies like this. We want to be able to assure ourselves that something like this could never happen to us or to anyone we care about. Unfortunately, sometimes you just can’t predict. That bothers us. So we are inundated with In Depth coverage of every tiny aspect of the shootings and of Cho’s life. Talking Heads and Armchair Experts are everywhere, with nice tidy explanations. All this so people can assure themselves that it could never happen to them and to satisfy the morbid curiosity we tend to have over great tragedies.
The Man of The House and I have had a running conversation the past few days on a subject that, as far as I know, none of the media have covered. Has anyone thought that all this attention is exactly what Cho was after? In between the two shooting sprees, he sent NBC what amounts to a press release. His name, his face, his words are everywhere. Think of the appeal: in one terrible morning Cho ended his misery, achieved revenge against people he perceived as responsible for his misery, and became famous. His name, his thoughts have made history. I suspect he died anticipating posthumous ‘glory.’ And he has gotten it.
He mentions the Columbine HS shooters as heroes. They also got a tremendous amount of media coverage. It’s about becoming famous. Becoming ‘visible.’ I guarantee that somewhere out there, disturbed ‘invisible’ teenagers are watching this endless media blitz and thinking how very attractive it all looks.
Is censoring the coverage the answer? No, I think that’s generally a bad idea. But I would like to hear some news/media person admit that all the attention might be very alluring.
DQ,
I agree with you, as do most of the Dr.s I work with. Everyday, we’re forced to D/C people who we know we’ll see again in a few weeks or months. We have no power, we’re hamstrung by stupid laws that make it dang near impossible to care for those who need the care.
Everyday we have to put people back ‘out’ who can’t function well in the real world. All because someone got all PC and touchy feely and ‘we can’t have mental warehousing anymore’. There are horror stories in the past, but now we have a population of homeless and helpless and dangerous that we can’t touch.
So, the state has dozens of building sitting empty that were at one time hospitals for the mentally ill and where they could get treatment until cured or at least be kept safe for themselves and society.
Cho? I don’t know, honestly what could have been done. As others have said, just cuz yer crazy doesn’t mean you’re stupid. And he was smart enough to know just what NOT to do to get admitted.
Interesting discussion.
My boss (a police officer) said, “If we were going to lock up everyone as suspicious who had ever written anything scary and gory, Stephen King would be first on the list.”
Everyday we have to put people back ‘out’ who can’t function well in the real world. All because someone got all PC and touchy feely and ‘we can’t have mental warehousing anymore’.
Actually, wasn’t it the Reagan Administration – not known for its “touchy-feeliness” – that dumped hundreds of thousands of mental patients onto the streets in order to remove the tax burden from the average American? I’m asking because that’s my memory of it, but if I’m wrong, feel free to correct me.
And no, I’m not blaming Reagan for VaTech. I just don’t remember the original thinking on this issue as having much to do with political correctness.
I agree with everything you said. There are way too many variables. It’s unfair to focus solely on his writing. I doubt his professors would have referred him to mental health services if he hadn’t displayed obvious sociopathic tendencies in addition to the plays.
However, I do think that it’s important for those who see creative works of students to watch out for warning signs of mental illness, if not for the safety of other students then for the safety of the person in question.
Due to severe depression, I was a danger to myself during the 8th grade. I was cutting myself and experiencing passive suicidal thoughts. My English teacher called my parents and showed them some of my creative writing assignments, which concerned him in addition to my slipping grades. Because of that intervention, I was able to get the help I needed.
Indeed, Kim. And I agree with those who said Cho wanted to be famous, or infamous. He got his wish, and he’s getting it every time his face or his words are smeared all over the front page of another paper.
I want to agree with Najida and December. Looking only at what he wrote or whether he watched violent movies or played a violent video game is not the issue with this young man. While I would need a thorough assessment to diagnose him, there are definitely several diagnosis that I would not be afraid to list as rule-outs just on the peripheral evidence:
– flat affect
– inability to form connections with others
– inappropriate sexualized behavior (taking inappropriate pictures of people under his desk)
– paranoia and feelings of persecution
In the context of these signs, I would take very seriously (and use as further justification) any bizarre or violent writings that he would have presented. But only within context.
Despite all this, as has been mentioned, he never did step over the line in such a way that allowed for the “system” to be effective in helping him. I know that it’s easy to villify a person who has committed such a horrible act, but I’m pretty clear that he was as much of a victim of his illness as the others. To get to such a point, his internal world must have been sheer hell.
I want to add that I don’t think this guy was a sociopath. Someone who is a sociopath can actually connect to people, but feels no qualms about destroying their lives. Jeffrey Dahmer comes to mind. I would say that what I’ve heard about his writings, they actually give some indication that he was interested in connecting with others but his experience was one of an external force that seemed to take away what he had earned…
Okay, I’ll stop being a therapist now.
I’ve seen reports, though, that a writing class was so disturbed by him that many students stopped coming and said it was because they were afraid of Cho. Also that Nikki Giovanni, who was teaching there, told administrators she could not teach him anymore because he disturbed her. (Some of this is from NPR but the students not coming to class story is from the blogosphere, so who knows.)
Here’s the LA Times report of this:
You can find the full article here:
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-tictoc18apr18,1,3326115.story?page=1
Hindsight is really the key word, here, isn’t it? So much easier to understand a mystery in reverse. Can someone’s fiction be a symptom of deeper problems? Sure, but it can also be a therapeutic outlet, a harmless imaginary creation, or the product of adolescent melodrama. It’s the isolation of these young men that always strikes me, and the impact of their disaffected state. How good a job are we doing as a society of really helping young kids and teens foster meaningful connections and a sense of engagement in personal relationships and social functions more generally? What about the kids who feel only 1/10th or 1/100th of the isolation Cho did, especially the boys? I do worry, sometimes, about how well we understand and are responsive to the inner lives of boys.