Colleges look for lessons in troubled case

Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung-Hui had exhibited warning signs, such as disturbing written compositions.

from the April 19, 2007 edition

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Virginia Tech's shooting now has college counseling centers across the country reevaluating the measures they have in place to avert similar tragedies – and perhaps to provide the kind of system Mr. McFarlane says he wanted – even as they try to reassure students.

"It's really important to think, 'How would we manage if we have a student like this on our campus?' " says Joshua Miller, a Smith College professor who specializes in the psychology of trauma and crisis response. "How would we identify that person? If another student was concerned about them, how would we respond? What would be the various approaches that we could use in a way that's not overreacting and instilling fear in everybody?"

The signs to look for have, in fact, become fairly standard. While an FBI report on threat assessments for school shooters cautioned that there's no single profile of a shooter, it included many signs for fellow students and teachers to be alert to, including shared threats or violent fantasies, lack of empathy, low tolerance for frustration, and extreme alienation.

Even before Cho was identified as the shooter at Virginia Tech, many experts and psychologists detailed a general profile that he came to fit almost perfectly. Among other characteristics, mass school shooters tend to be men with psychological wounds from an abusive or troubled past. They are loners whose final outburst is often triggered by a rejection, real or perceived.

Investigators had trouble finding information about Cho because of his extreme social alienation. In both of his plays published online, adult male authority figures are described as having sexually molested or raped teenage boys. Accusations that Cho stalked women may indicate that he felt slighted by a woman.

Patient confidentiality laws make it hard for mental-health workers to speak out, even if they see troubling signs.

"There's an inherent conflict in that, for a dean of students to know which students are most at risk, they need as much information as possible," says Christopher Overtree, director of the Psychological Services Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. "But for individual students to have their rights to medical- and mental-health privacy protected, that information needs to be kept from the deans. So you have this tricky loop."

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