"As for why what was wrong with Cho remains mostly un-named in the Press? I haven’t a clue…"
As soon as I asked that question in my last post, I recognized that I might know the answer. By the time effective medication became available for the treatment of Psychotic illnesses, Schizophrenia in particular, the problem of mental illness was huge. Gigantic hospitals with thousands of patients had become expensive but poorly maintained warehouses for the desparately ill. The antipsychotic medications provided a key to open the door and allow many of the severely afflicted to live in society. The Community Mental Health movement flourished, and the "snake pits" our mental hospitals had become began to close. But antipsychotics don’t cure Schizophrenia. They treat symptoms. There remain a larger than we would like group of patients for whom this illness is still a life stopper.
Now, there are no long term treatment facilities, or in some cases, holding facilities for the treatment failures. They live on the streets, in the jails, or are taken care of by their families. People don’t talk much about patients who don’t get well. We live in a "get-well" world. If it’s so hard for professionals to come forward and say the obvious, "Cho had Chronic Paranoid Schizophrenia," it must mean that things have become such that it’s not even talked about any more. If it can’t even be said now, it’s little wonder that no one said it when he was alive or took enough notice to take the appropriate steps to relieve his suffering as much as possible and protect both him and society from the ravages of his illness.
So Cho, a man with deteriorating Chronic Paranoid Schizophrenia, a man who needed to be medicated and perhaps confined, was left to experience his torment in a dorm room, crazy, until he announced in his bizarre way that he couldn’t take it any more. A mental health system that cannot deal with a full spectrum of outcomes to treatment is no system at all. Cho wasn’t dealt with because we apparently don’t do that anymore. We only deal with people who can get better. Cho stands as a dramatic and painful example of the plight of the desparately mentally ill [alongside Son of Sam, the Unibomber, and countless others].
So let’s name it – Chronic Paranoid Schizophrenia. It can’t be addressed without a proper name…
Quite right. I posted some thoughts yesterday from my perpective as a former community mental health counselor. One of the risks we face from this event is a return to stigmatization of those with mental illness. It is a quandary.
The inability of the US press, leadership and public to understand the dimensions of schizophrenia has been a longtime problem. This led in the 1970s to the unwise policy of closing most residential mental health facilities and making nearly impossible the involuntary commitment of people who had the potential to be dangerous to themselves and society at large. Cho was clearly a chronic paranoid schizophrenic who was incapable of caring for himself or living in society without constant medication and monitoring. He should have been committed to an institution before he killed so many. Those victims died because the American public and elected leaders do not understand mental illness and continue to make poor laws and policies on the basic of their misinformation.
I predict that we are about to see laws enacted that will make it impossible for anyone who has sought counseling for anything listed in the DSM to purchase a gun. That will have the unintended consequence of causing people who need help, be they dangerous to society or not, from not seeking it.
I am a family member who has been diagnosed with CPS. She is my 32 year old daughter. I am scared at this point of my life. My daughter tells me she would like to take out a lot of people and could I get her a gun. I asked her why and she said because she didn’t want them to go through what she has gone through. She also tells me she has a list and when I asked “was I on the list she said yes”. She has no insurance, she doesn’t take her meds and has all of the classic signs associated with CPS. I am in this alone because her father turned his back. I try to protect and care for her but at this point I am starting to worry more about my own safety.
I left out a few words in the first sentenc. I am a family member of __SOMEONE who has been diagnosed with CSP.