Seung-Hui Cho’s Diagnosis: Selective Mutism

by Kristina Chew, PhD on August 30th, 2007

Speculation that Seung-Hui Cho had autism circulated after last April’s shooting massacre. On August 20, the Wall Street Journal reported that Cho had been diagnosed with selective mutism while in high school in Fairfax County, Virginia. The Report of the Virginia Tech Review Panel on what happened on April 16th is now available: The August 30th Washington Post notes:

The [8-member] panel [appointed by Virginia governor Tim Kaine] found that Cho showed signs of mental health problems from childhood and was treated by both counseling and medication at different times through high school. In 1999, after the shootings at Columbine High School, Cho began to write about suicide and homicide, the panel reported.

When he was preparing to go to college, his family and high school guidance counselors advised him against attending Virginia Tech because they feared that it was too big a university and was not the right environment for him. The help Cho received in middle and high school did not continue when he went to Virginia Tech because the university was not made aware of his mental health problems, the panel found.

The report “sharply criticized” (says the August 30th New York Times) Virginia Tech for the decisions that it made before and after the shootings by Cho. Lives could have been saved had university officials notified students and faculty “much earlier about the killings on campus.”

Because university officials misunderstood federal privacy laws as forbidding any exchange of a student’s mental health information, the panel’s long-awaited report concludes, they missed numerous indications of the gunman’s mental health problems [my emphasis].

After a judge ordered the gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, to receive outpatient mental health care for making suicidal statements, Mr. Cho scheduled an appointment at the campus counseling center but was given only a pre-appointment interview, the report said, and no follow-up appointment occurred. Records of the interview are missing, and Mr. Cho’s parents were never informed by campus or local officials of his statements or brief commitment to a mental health facility, the report said.

………..

Though the report’s criticism was strong, it concluded that a campuswide lockdown after the first shootings, a double homicide, would have been impractical and probably ineffective in stopping Mr. Cho, 23.

“There does not seem to be a plausible scenario of a university response to the double homicide that could have prevented the tragedy of considerable magnitude on April 16,” the report said. “Cho had started on a mission of fulfilling a fantasy of revenge.”

But if the university had issued an alert earlier or canceled classes after Mr. Cho shot his first two victims, before moving on to shoot the rest in a classroom building, the death toll might have been lower, the report said. It found that even after university officials had learned the full scope of the massacre, their messages to students played down the unfolding emergency as a “routine police procedure.”

“The events were highly disturbing and there was no way to sugarcoat them” in disseminating the news, the report said. “Straight facts were needed.”

Campus and local police responses were “well-coordinated,” the report said, but university police officers erred in prematurely concluding that their initial lead in the double homicide was a good one. The police initially believed the shooting was an isolated domestic dispute and erroneously pursued a suspect who they thought had left the campus.

Miscommunication and, simply, lack of communication—about Cho’s diagnosis of selective mutism and of the educational accommodations he received in high school; among university officials, campus security, the police, and students and faculty about what was happening on the VTech campus on April 18th—-are the themes that my mind keeps returning to as I read the reports about Cho. The New York Times further notes that

…… while the campus police knew of Mr. Cho’s repeated instances of inappropriate behavior and his stay at a mental health facility, that information never reached campus workers who deal with troubled students. Contrary to what university officials believed, the report said, federal privacy laws would have allowed them to communicate some information about Mr. Cho’s mental health problems among local, state and campus security officials.

“Information privacy laws cannot help students if the law allows sharing, but agency policy or practice forbids necessary sharing,” it concludes. The report also said “passivity” and lack of resources had hampered local and campus mental health workers.

Reports that Cho might have had autism sparked a lot of discussion: Would autism be linked inextricably with terrible, violent behavior such as Cho did at VTech? While it now seems that Cho did not have autism, a number of issues about special education, higher education, and disclosure remain. The August 30th Washington Post notes that Cho was advised not to attend a large school for college “because of concerns he would be unable to communicate and function socially,” due to his diagnosis of selective mutism. VTech officials were never told about Cho’s diagnosis and need for accommodations, another Washington Post article (August 27th) reports:

Unless Cho himself had disclosed the disorder, first reported by The Wall Street Journal last week, privacy laws would deny the university access to information about his therapy.

“We did not have any of that information,” university President Charles Steger told The Associated Press. “The information that we seek for admissions, other than did you get your measles shot or whatever, is the academic record.”

Fairfax spokesman Paul Regnier said privacy laws prevented him from discussing Cho’s activity in the school system.

However, Cho’s family gave the school system permission to provide the material only to Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s investigative panel, which is expected to report its findings Thursday.

A student’s IEP does not follow her or him to college; it is up to the student to disclose this information. In some cases, students have only told me that they had been in special education or had IEPs after they had difficulties in a college course. Students felt that they no longer needed any accommodations or extra help while in college; some students saw college as a chance for a “fresh start,” without being labeled or “classified.” It seems to me that it is all the more important that students know that it is all right to ask for help and to say that one has a disability; it seems to me that we need to attach much less shame. I hope that students might learn that knowing how to ask for help is a sign of maturity and independence. I am not sure how to go about this without infringing on privacy laws, but might there be some way to communicate that a student has a disability and that certain services and accommodations have greatly helped him.

It just seems that we can do a better job communicating with each other—-before it’s too, too late.

b5media.com

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Seung-Hui Cho’s Diagnosis: Selective Mutism

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