It was nearly impossible to make a phone call to Blacksburg, Va. on April 16. Frantic calls clogged the lines, as people tried to confirm that their friends and family members weren’t victims of the worst school shooting in history. The killer was dead by the end of the massacre at Virginia Tech, but this was only the beginning.
The attacks directly touched relatively few people outside Virginia, yet many college students probably felt deeply affected. As more and more information about shooter Seung-Hui Cho was released into the media, the world learned about the quiet English major who kept to himself, was socially isolated, unsuspecting and undetectable. Who knew where the next Cho could be lurking? At a place like Northwestern, with such high pressure for achievement, what are the chances that a Cho could emerge from the crowd?
“The kinds of violence perpetrated by Mr. Cho are so rare that they are virtually impossible to predict with any kind of scientific accuracy,” said Rick Zinbarg, associate professor of psychology. “Pick any other rare behavior, including positive rare behavior, and by virtue of their rareness they are extremely difficult to predict.”
Any screening process for students to identify mentally unstable people would create more problems than benefits because of its lack of accuracy, Zinbarg said. It is impossible to design a screening that is 100 percent accurate, because even if a test is 99 percent effective at finding potential threats, it would identify 70 undergraduates of the roughly 7,000 undergraduates at Northwestern as “the next Cho,” he said.
“Yes, they write disturbing poetry,” Zinbarg said. “But they’re not going to kill anyone. Maybe their poetry will even go on the win the Pulitzer Prize.”
Developing a screening system itself is a hard task, Zinbarg said.
“There’s no diagnosis in the current diagnostic system that a symptom is shooting other people,” Zinbarg said.
Counseling and Psychological Services has developed some programs to help identify people who could be a danger to themselves or others, CAPS Director John Dunkle said. CAPS works with third parties to help reach students who aren’t comfortable with going to a psychologist on their own.
“We spend a lot of time doing gatekeeper training. We do orientation for CAs and we have a liaison system with residential halls,” Dunkle said. “We cannot reach every student on this campus. It’s impossible. But we can reach the gatekeeper people.”
CAPS has also created alternative programming to give more people access to their services. The Developmental Programming Workshops offer clinics about common issues that college students face, like relationship problems, eating disorders and stress for students worried about the stigma of seeing a professional therapist.
Dunkle said that safety is the primary concern at CAPS. Psychologists ask clients if they have thought about hurting themselves or someone else at every assessment. But no system is foolproof, he said.
“We don’t have crystal balls,” Dunkle said. “We can’t read minds, contrary to people’s misconceptions.”
Even if a student is identified as a threat, there isn’t much the law allows mental health professionals to do, Dunkle said, because a psychologist can only involuntarily commit someone into a hospital when they say they will commit violence against themselves or another person. Other than that, CAPS can only provide counseling and in-office treatment.
The university has more leeway in handling potentially dangerous students, said Mary Desler, vice president and dean of Student Affairs. Officials can seek people out, call in the parents or even send students home if they decide that is the best course of action for the safety of the student and the people around him or her.
“We deal with them in a caring, sensitive, quiet way,” Desler said. “We don’t send the police in with guns a-blazing to drag them off in the paddy wagon.”
Desler said she talks with CAPS every day about students’ mental health. The two offices work together on the psychological and behavioral issues to make a plan of action for helping the students. However, she made it clear that mental illness and violence are not always related.
“One of the negative effects of the Virginia Tech murders is that everyone thinks anyone dealing with mental health issues is going to shoot 32 people,” she said. “[Likewise] every time you see someone being disruptive it doesn’t mean they’re mentally ill.”
Zinbarg also said he was reluctant to attribute Cho’s violence to mental illness. While he admitted there was a strong possibility, he said that no one could really know what was going on in Cho’s head.
“It sounds like there was some depression,” Zinbarg said. “It depends on whether he had psychopathology at all. It wouldn’t surprise me, but I certainly wouldn’t say everyone who commits mass murder has psychopathology.”
In the meantime, the university is trying doing what it has always done: keep everyone safe they best way they know how. Desler and Dunkle said they focus on finding students who are having problems, and on providing opportunities for them to get help. Desler sends e-mails, makes phone calls and has even been known to show up at someone’s class to get in touch with troubled students. A few years ago, she said she went to a student’s apartment to gather his things to take him to the hospital.
“I felt a little weird going through his drawers and the pile of clothes in the corner,” she said. “I don’t think people realize we care a little bit.”
So what is the likelihood that the next Cho is sitting across the table from you at the dining hall? Slim to none, Zinbarg said.
“That there are one in 7,000 real Chos, that’s a gross overstatement,” Zinbarg said. “It’s probably one in one million. People need to run the numbers for themselves.”