Your point is well taken that a more aggressive mental health policy might be too costly in terms of number of people hospitalized – too many false positives. But you focused on separating Mr. Cho from society, as did most people.

I saw Mr. Cho as a tormented soul, and I wondered if something could have been done for him. The judge ordered treatment for him, but there seemed to be no followup, even though he was getting worse all the time.

A few joints might have done the trick in his case.

That is not my experience.

I have not practiced in Virginia in a while, but please consider (Mr. Nuesslein) that I live and work in a state (NC) where mental health services are a sad joke (and the fact that they’re a joke is making all the headlines).

You can diagnose things all day long (and or refer the most desperate/awful things to DSS), but it does not matter when the system in place allows so much and so many to fall through the cracks.

Th clip size is irrelevant (in this case) to anyone without an agenda regarding guns: Cho reloaded MULTIPLE times. If the clips had been smaller (and they were actually standard sized clips for the weapon in question, last I heard), he could simply have reloaded more times, as there was no time pressure.

And yes, it usually does take a body count to gt pople to bother with things like this. Unfortunately, that seems to be the nature of humanity.

The system failed to hospitalize Cho and to keep guns from him. Bad law and the fear of lawsuits were components in that failure. It was known to the court and in the University that Cho was very sick, the system did recognize him.

I questioned whether Cho’s illness was correctly diagnosed. I also wondered why the various parties involved did not see the progression of the illness, especially the court. Most judges have a thither when their orders are not fully carried out.

If that’s because these laws are badly written or hard to understand or contradictory or impossible to implement without STILL worrying about getting sued, then that’s something that needs to be debated and fixed.

The very sad thing is that the debate – and the fixing – never happens until a tragedy like this takes place. People have to die to get anyone to give it a second thought.

I ask children who I know to tell me about their best friends. My simple test would have gotten to Mr. Cho’s illness, his inability to connect to other human beings.

Maybe Dr. Johnson can help us out. Are there any proven techniques to help people with this sickness? Why didn’t anybody see that Cho was getting worse over time despite their efforts? Supposedly he didn’t talk to his suite mates for nine months.

There is a tradeoff between unnecessarily hospitalizing people and violating people’s privacy versus providing proper treatment for seriously ill persons. I agree with Mr. Olson that decency was sacrificed to the activists.

Cho should not have been sold the guns – and those guns had large clips. Better still would have been helping him cope with his torment.

http://drjshousecalls.blogspot.com/2007/04/imperfect-connection.html#links