BecauseHeLives wrote:I think its pretty safe to say that according to atheists Cho was NOT evil. Since atheists don't believe in evil then how can Cho be evil?
It is also pretty safe to say that among educated Christians who understand that mental illness is a real phenomenon, Cho wasn't evil. He was an extremely sick, dangerous person. His rantings on that tape are so obviously deranged and crazy; how would anybody think he was even slightly sane?
The rantings fit best with the diagnosis, "paranoid schizophrenic" and there may have been some aspects of autism in the mix. Sometimes schizophrenia is a treatable disease, sometimes not. But this kind of disorder exists in the world, and until such a time as there is a cure, we had better stop closing our eyes to it and dumping severely mentally ill people with dangerous ideation like Cho back on the streets.
Now, please remember that most people with mental illness are NOT dangerous, and harm nobody but themselves. But in the 1970s, this country made a decision to close most of the public and residential mental institutions in the U.S. and to try to treat severe mental illness like an acute medical illness that can be safely treated with a few days in the hospital and some medication, and then outpatient treatment. Of course, then they didn't fund the outpatient treatment side of the new configuration.
What Cho did has nothing to do with poor parenting, with lack of discipline, or with demons and the devil. It has to do with a serious chemical imbalance in the brain.
Way too many people think that a person who is frankly insane is unable to take any purposive action. That is a stupid and dangerous mistake to make, as Cho just showed us. The form that this kind of disease takes is that the person (who has a severe chemical imbalance in his/her brain) gets thoughts that are completely false.
Cho obviously thought that he was being oppressed by the rest of the world. In fact, many, many people tried hard to help him, and it is clear that his roomates and other students at the school tried to reach out to him. He was just way too disordered to be able to accept or use that help. I have no idea if Cho was treatable. It sounds like he was only in a mental hospital for a few days at most, and that is not enough to do a thorough assessment and diagnosis much less provide the type of treatment over a sufficient period of time to determine what level of functioning he would have with treatment.
Anyway, the typical course of events is the untreated paranoid schizophrenic gets a completely false, crazy assumption in his/her brain, and then bases his/her behavior on the false beliefs of persecution. Since they believe they are being attacked, they think they have to "defend" themselves. And it gets even crazier from there.
A wise commentator on one of our local Denver channels said that unless the American people are willing to acknowledge that there are some people who are way too sick to be let out onto the streets, we will continue to have these horrific events from time to time.
Fortunately, it is a relatively small number of people who are so mentally ill that medicine cannot provide a degree of improvement that will allow them to function safely in the community (under medication and supervision when necessary). But the fact is that
a few severely mentally ill people do not respond to treatment or will not take their medications. And they are dangerous. Very, very dangerous. And they do need to be confined--permanently--for the safety of society.
The cost of refusing to acknowledge this reality is more awful, horrific, grievious events such as that at VA Tech.
