What If Cho Seung-hui Wasn't Mentally Ill?

When tragedies happen, people need to find a reason that explains how such a thing could happen. When Cho Seung-hui slaughtered 32 people and then killed himself, the media (and I) were quick to blame his actions on mental illness. It's true that he had been diagnosed as depressed and a possible threat to his own safety and that of others, but he was released, despite the stalking incidents (no charges pressed) that landed him in a psych evaluation to begin with.

But was he mentally ill? Some don't think so.

The Last Psychiatrist doesn't think he was mentally ill at all:

A thoughtful reader concerned about backlash against the mentally ill asked me to write a piece basically saying that not all mentally ill people were homicidal maniacs.

It's a fair request, but in this case it's counterproductive. Here's what I mean: you want to say that "not all mentally ill people are violent." You want counterexamples to Cho's example. But that's a defensive posture, unnecessary because... Cho wasn't mentally ill. He was a sad, bad man who killed people because his life wasn't validated. There was no psychosis, there was no cognitive impairment, there was no psychiatric impairment in insight in judgment. There was a lack of sex, but that's not yet in the DSM.

Not to reduce his life down to a soundbite, but he was a guy who thought he deserved better by virtue of his intelligence and suffering; found himself in a sea of mediocrity but couldn't understand why he couldn't therefore excel; and, worst of all, found that all the things he thought he deserved eluded him-- especially hot chicks, who not only dismissed him and found him creepy, but, worse, chose to be with the very men he thought were obviously inferior to him.

He concludes his post with the following observation:

In other words, the difference is this: he decided to shoot 30 people, and you didn't. That's it. I know it's not a satisfying answer, I know we want explanations, but there aren't any. Forget genes, forget DSM. He chose to do something bad, he knew it was bad, but he did it anyway.

This is certainly a conservative take on the situation. Personal responsibility is nearly always the bottom line. And I'm not sure I disagree. It's tempting to blame social pressures and any number of other possible factors, but these rationale don't hold a lot of water if he wasn't insane -- and if he was insane, they still don't hold water because they are irrelevant.

I realize using the word "insane" is a loaded proposition -- it's a legal term, not a psychological term. Clinically speaking, he was either psychotic or he wasn't. If he wasn't, then he is responsible for his actions no matter what factors drove him to buy two guns (30 days apart), get some clips on E-Bay, make video tapes to send to the press, chain the doors so no one could escape, and then kill all those innocent people.

It's too premeditated and too-well planned to be the act of a psychotically broken mind.

Camille Paglia has another take on the situation, one that does look to our society as a major factor in what happened:

Camille Paglia, professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and author of Sexual Personae, believes Cho is emblematic of the crisis of masculinity in America. “Women have difficulty understanding the mix of male sexual aggression with egotism and the ecstasy of self-immolation,” she says. Or to quote Martin Amis on that other killer, Fred West: he became “addicted to the moment where impotence becomes prepotence”.
...

Paglia believes the school Cho attended would have been no better equipped to deal with frustrated young males. “There is nothing happening educationally in these boring prisons that are fondly called suburban high schools. They are saturated with a false humanitarianism, which is especially damaging for boys.

“Young men have enormous energy. There was a time when they could run away, hop on a freighter, go to a factory and earn money, do something with their hands. Now there is this snobbery of the upper-middle-class professional. Everyone has to be a lawyer or paper pusher.”

Cho is a classic example of “someone who felt he was a loser in the cruel social rat race”, Paglia says. The pervasive hook-up culture at college, where girls are prepared to sleep with boys they barely know or fancy, can be a source of seething resentment and alienation for those who are left out.

“Young women now seem to want to behave like men and have sex without commitment. The signals they are giving are very confusing, and rage and humiliation build up in boys who are spurned again and again.”

The sex, Paglia argues, “is everywhere but it is not erotic”, as can be seen by the sad spectacle of Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears flashing their lack of underwear during a night on the town. “It’s not even titillating. It’s banal and debasing.”

...

“When someone opens the door of a classroom and begins firing with a semi-automatic weapon, there is no fighting back possible,” says Paglia. “All of this happened too fast for the young men or young women to rush the shooter and bring him down.”

Paglia is a defender of the constitutional right to bear arms in America. She is troubled, however, by the ease with which Cho bought his weapons. “The problem is not hunting guns but these semi-automatic weapons. He could not have cut down that many people so quickly or with such brutal efficiency without them. They have no use except for commandos, swat teams and paramilitary organisations.

“This is part of the plague that has come with the drug culture in the inner cities,” she says. “Cho’s use of semi-automatic weapons can ultimately be traced back to gangsta rap. It is a fabrication of urban life which is sold to teenagers trapped in the utterly sterile shopping-mall culture of the American suburbs.”

“Throughout most of human history men have been armed, but with swords not guns,” Paglia observes. As the weapons grow more deadly, even a solitary “boy” can commit the worst massacre in American history. This is the 19th such scenario in the past decade. Unfortunately it is unlikely to be the last.

Is Cho "emblematic of the crisis of masculinity in America" as Paglia suggests? And by extension, are young males, in general, experiencing this same crisis to greater or lesser degrees all around the county?

There are at least two assumptions in Paglia's statements.

The first is that Cho's actions were the result of our current socio-cultural values -- where women can engage in meaningless hook-ups as easily as can men. The implication is that Cho, and many young males, feel emasculated and dismissed if they can't partake of this new atmosphere. After many years of turning such rejection inward, resulting in depression and stalking behaviors, Cho exploded in a frightening act of violence.

I don't buy this explanation. Many other young men would conceivably feel the same way and not shoot 32 people in a premeditated act of rage. To me, this feels like blaming the victims, at least some of them,

The second assumption is that males in our culture are trapped "in the utterly sterile shopping-mall culture of the American suburbs," a situation that leaves them seeking thrills and excitement. There is some evidence, just posted today, that young people lack impulse control, with them more likely to seek thrills.

Ignorance or a sense of invulnerability doesn't explain why teens take risks, he notes, because studies have shown that they are just as good as adults in understanding risks and their vulnerability to them. But during puberty, Steinberg adds, a system he calls the "socioemotional network" that pushes kids to seek novelty and take risks becomes activated, especially in the company of peers.

While the biological reasons behind this shift are not clear, major changes in the dopamine system are known to occur in adolescence. In evolutionary terms, these changes likely encouraged newly sexually mature humans to have sex, thus helping to perpetuate the species, he adds. "There's a reason why you do want people to be kind of oriented toward reward and novelty during adolescence. You just don't want them to satisfy those urges in unhealthy ways."

This research suggests that there is a biochemical factor in all of this -- not even including his diagnosed depression. Young people lack the brain development to control impulses. I can buy that this true.

If Paglia is right, our young men need an outlet -- that they don't currently have if they are not athletic -- for their evolutionarily-driven need for novel experience and risk-taking. She attributes Cho's actions to the influence of how urban "gangsta" culture is marketed to young men in particular.

In rap music and videos, violence (and vengeance) is romanticized. But it is also romanticized in video games and movies like Taxi Driver and Falling Down, to name only two. Millions and millions of people view these games and movies and do not kill a classroom full of students.

Again, I'm not buying Paglia's argument. I'm not prepared to write off Cho's actions as a result of feminine freedom or the marketing of gangsta culture. She seems to be blaming liberal sexual values (and the women who take advantage of them) and the free speech protections of violent images and music --- but at least she is also blaming lax gun laws.

Still, his actions strike me as more sociopathic than socially-driven.

From Wikipedia:

Central to understanding individuals diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder is that they appear to experience a limited range of human emotions. This can explain their lack of empathy for the suffering of others, since they cannot experience the emotion associated with either empathy or suffering. Risk-seeking behavior and substance abuse may be attempts to escape feeling empty or emotionally void. The rage exhibited by psychopaths and the anxiety associated with certain types of antisocial personality disorder may represent the limit of emotion experienced or there may be physiological responses without analogy to emotion experienced by others.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if it comes out that Cho had abused animals during his adolescence. It fits the pattern.

In reality, there is no simple explanation, such as mental illness or socio-cultural influence. I do think that Cho was suffering from antisocial personality disorder -- but is that enough to diagnose him as criminally insane?

I don't know.

It would certainly be the easiest answer, and it would make us feel a lot better -- but these things seldom have an easy answer. We may have to accept some ambiguity.

Tags: Cho Seung-hui, mental illness, Camille Paglia, The Last Psychiatrist, criminally insane, Virginia Tech, antisocial personality disorder, gangsta culture, sexual freedom