Catching Up: Violence and Mental Health

It has been a long time between posts! I took a bit of vacation and then had a lot of work to get caught up on. Now there is far too much happening to even focus on a single issue. However, I have been asked to speak at a workshop: http://www.caubo.ca/pandemic/workshops_emergency_agenda_e.cfm . The workshop is on Emergency Preparedness and is sponsored by the Canadian Association of University Business Officers (CAUBO). CAUBO represents the administrative and finance executives at universities. The audience for this workshop will be university security people, administration and student affairs professionals. I will be the only Student affairs person speaking and will be trying to educate the audience on our student body. The people that they are supposed to be protecting.

I agreed to speak at this workshop before the most recent campus shootings at Northern Illinois University (NIU): http://www.thestar.com/article/304347 . The incident was also covered in insidehighered.com the day after it occurred and then in a slightly corrected form on the following Monday. Presumably everyone knows the story by now. A graduate student named Steven Kazmierczak returned to NIU with 3 guns, entered a lecture hall and proceeded to shoot and kill four students and himself. The entire incident lasted just a few minutes. The NIU shootings followed by about a week an attack at Louisiana Technical College where a nursing student killed two classmates before turning the gun on herself.

It was discovered soon after the NIU shootings that Mr. Kazmierczak (who was actually a graduate student at the University of Illinois) had been taking medication for a mental illness but had discontinued taking his medicine. The Chicago Tribune has been diligent in its coverage of the NIU shootings and this article should be consulted for a link to the current status. This past Monday, for example, students returned to class at NIU. This USA Today report has links to other papers as well. One of the very disturbing discoveries has been that the same gun dealer was involved in both the NIU and The Virginia Tech shootings.

I have not been able to find much additional information about the Louisiana Tech shootings. The Chronicle of Higher Education has found “no answers”. There is no question that this shooting has received much less media coverage than either the NIU or VTU shootings. For example, I am unsure whether or not the shooter at Virginia Tech (Latina Williams) had any history of mental illness or not. It is noteworthy that according to a later article in the Chronicle: “Louisiana Technical had immediately activated its emergency-response plan, and instructors told students to stay in their classrooms. Some remained there for hours as police interviewed witnesses, according to news reports.” This brings me back to my reason for writing this blog. Do these “emergency response” plans have any effect? And more importantly, is there any way that the shootings can be stopped before they happen? (For now the title of my presentation at CAUBO is: “Student Counselling to Recognize “at risk” Individuals and how to Intervene Before Violence Occurs”. I’ll probably change it!

Attention seems to focus on university counseling centres after campus shootings. Especially if it is revealed that the shooter had been seeking help for a “mental illness”. After all, if the centres know that they have a nut on their hands, why don’t they tell the police and put her or him (usually) away? This is what is being proposed at Arizona State University where the headline in a recent issue of the student newspaper read:
Should hidden mental health issues be exposed?

After recent fatal campus shootings, ASU examines whether to require students to disclose mental health histories

 

The answer is: No!

In a very heartfelt essay, Dr. Jonathan Perry, Director of Counseling and Psychological Services at the University of Arkansas wrote: “I will not be at all surprised if, somehow or other, it emerges that Kazmierczak had been diagnosed with a psychiatric condition while at NIU and prescribed medication for it. I will not be surprised if he was treated at either the counseling center or the health center (or both) there. I will not be surprised if it turns out that he was being treated, or had been, by the counseling center and/or the health center at UIUC. (Let me state that I DO NOT have any insider information. I know nothing that hasn’t come straight from the media, nor do I expect to. So please do not take what I have just written as “the truth”.) In other words, I will not be surprised to learn that he was one of THEM–people with mental disorders. Except “them” is us. NUTS-R-US. Twenty-five percent of Americans suffer from at least one episode of a mental disorder every year. TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT. We believe that this number applies to college students as well, and it may be even higher.”

“There is emerging a tremendous pressure for campuses to do something about “them”. Many actions are admirable: the founding of student peer support groups such as Active Minds, the pumping of additional resources into student mental health services, the tremendous support offered students with psychiatric disabilities. But there is also a growing number of potentially dangerous and poorly conceived efforts to find out who “they” are: requirements that incoming students disclose their mental health treatment history (see ASU), weakening of rules concerning the confidentiality of contacts with counseling centers and health centers, the ejection from campus of “them” if they get into any trouble at all or if their suffering and symptoms are too evident. I said after Virginia Tech that one result of that tragedy would be the targeting for suspicion of all of the creepy, quirky, weird, or unpleasant students, and I was right. It has happened, it IS happening, and now it is just going to get worse, because “we” are scared of “them”.

I write this because my job at the CAUBO workshop will be to describe what we are doing at McMaster University to prevent the kind of shootings that we are seeing on campuses in the U.S. but we in Canada are not immune either. The problem is: to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a police or security officer everything looks like a security problem. A simple way to solve the problem – get rid of anyone who has a mental illness. However, as Dr. Perry suggests above, it’s not that simple. At a school the size of McMaster, there are hundreds of students with significant psychological problems. Our work in Student Affairs is not to try to identify the one who might do something destructive. Our job is to help as many as we can to be successful students. Our view is that by providing the supports necessary we will not only be able to help students, there is a greater possibility that we will be able to identify the persons who are likely to harm themselves or others.

I am working on my presentation now and will use some of it for my next posting.