By Katherine Ramsland

It's not easy to forgive what Cho did on April 16 at Virginia Tech, but it's important to try to understand, if only to move more quickly in the future to intervene with people like him.  There could be many colleges and universities, not to mention high schools and workplaces, which need guidelines about such disturbed personalities.  After Cho sent numerous photos and video clips of himself to NBC with a rambling message about his anger and paranoia, it was obvious he was mentally ill, but what can we make of this kind of disorder?

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Cho was reportedly on medication for depression — his package included such a diagnosis — but he appears instead to have been grandiose in his final actions, even psychotic.  If he had such a distorted grasp of reality and such a paranoid degree of anger that he was determined by a judge to be a danger to himself in 2005, how did the counseling center miss the signs?  How did he manage to keep it under wraps for another year and a half?

It's possible that in 2005, he either reverted to his typical mode of withdrawal and said little, which would look more like depression, or he actually was depressed at that time and had a psychotic break sometime afterward.  It's common with schizophrenia, for example, to be undetected until the late teens or early twenties.  Perhaps the break occurred sometime just before he began to work out and prepare for his assault.  But it's also true that the gun dealers saw no sign of mental illness.  Cho was composed and seemed clean-cut, not the typical manner of psychosis.  In other words, even if he had a break, he also had presence of mind to keep to himself and "pass" as normal.

It's possible that Cho existed in a gray area that put him out of reach of a diagnosis based on short-term therapy.  If his counselor had determined in 2005 that he was no longer a danger and could be allowed to return to school, then by law he can't be forced to go to counseling or to leave the campus.

Unfortunately, given privacy laws, we may never know what decisions were made or how they were made.  But it's clear that throughout 2006, Cho revealed nothing to others — including his suitemates — that something was dramatically wrong with him.  He even managed to shoot the bizarre videos and photos of himself, apparently in the suite, without the others suspecting.  So for what it's worth, even as a person with a paranoid psychosis, he was firmly controlled until the very end.  He formed a plan and he methodically carried it out, with great secrecy and deadly intent.

 

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by Katherine Ramsland