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Mentally ill man kills 32 at Virginia Tech! This news transformed my day into one of the worst of my life. I spent 5 years at Virginia Tech and I currently conduct research on persons with mental illness in the criminal justice system. In the week after the shooting I provided several television interviews, newspaper interviews, radio interviews to a local station and even one to a New Zealand station.
The problem was that everyone was asking the wrong questions and focused on the wrong things. People wanted to talk about the sensational nature of the case. I was asked questions about how you predict whether or not someone will be a mass murderer and why he fired the number of shots that he did. Other people talked about making it harder to buy guns. Still others blamed various agencies such as the courts, the police, and mental health officials for “not doing something” ahead of time to stop the shooting.
I developed several thoughts on the matter. In a state like Virginia you are not going to reduce the number of guns in the hands of average citizens any time soon. Psychiatrists and others are notoriously bad at judging which specific individuals will be violent let alone mass murderers. The police, courts, and mental health agencies have to respect the rights of individuals. They cannot simply remove people who might be violent from society. This would radically transform our society for the worse.
So what can be done? Nothing? Something? What? The most sensible thing to do as far as I am concerned is to provide mental health treatment to those in jail, prisons, community mental health centers, and hospitals. Provide decent, respectful treatment to all of those who ask for it. Also, make sure that there is pre-release planning so that when people with mental illnesses leave an institution they are connected to community treatment. While everyone is running around trying to force “would-be” mass murders into treatment, the moral and economical thing to do is to provide treatment to those already asking for it. As I have discussed in a previous article, jailed women in New York lack adequate mental health treatment. The same is true across the country. Why is it that when individuals ask for treatment they are told to stand at the back of the line and wait, but when they commit heinous felonies we try to force it upon them?
We can’t predict the next mass murderer even if we can in retrospect see the signs. We can’t and don’t want to change universities and society in a way where everyone’s rights are suspended. We do want to be humane and we do want to prevent tragedies such as the one at Virginia Tech. We can do that by providing more mental health treatment particularly to those who are on a correctional facility and ask for it.