Confronting Madness

One of the first questions that pass through a person's mind after a tragedy like the one at Virginia Tech this week is "What was the killer thinking?". It's the same question that was asked after Columbine or any other of incidents where teenagers or young adults resort to mass slaughterMost people probably knew the profile that would come out about the gunman. "a loner", "angry" "isolated" we all know them, we've heard them before. So the ultimate questions are, How do we construct a mechanism able to Identify at risk individuals? What do the levels and degrees of intervention look like? And is there a point where participation in evaluation and treatment become mandatory?I think our first line of defense is the teachers and professors who interact with the students every day. Teacher need to have much more intensive training in identifying warning signs and at the very least trigger an evaluation. This is also true at the college level. Most of the most profound mental illness' manifest themselves in the late teens and early 20's. Schizophrenia and Bi-polar are the two that people are most familiar.So many mental illness' can be successfully treated with early interventions. Early intervention that could, at the least save a person from prison and at the most save innocent people's lives.We can avoid this debate by dismissing the perpetrator as a "madman" or "a crazed gunman" or we can admit that mental health is as important to a society as physical health is to the individual. Our prisons are clogged with people with mental health issues that early intervention may have made their lives far more productive. Our families are torn apart by the stress of dealing with a loved one suffering from a mental illness. We have a chose, open a dialogue on how best to evaluated and treat mental illness in a pro-active and preventative way or we can avoid it and wait until once again we are confronted with madness.