Va. Tech rampage shines light on mental health issues on campuses

Campuses have taken steps to identify troubled students earlier.

Associated Press

The rampage carried out nearly a year ago by a deranged Virginia Tech student who slipped through the mental health system has changed how American colleges reach out to troubled students.

Administrators are pushing students harder to get help, looking more aggressively for signs of trouble and urging faculty to speak up when they have concerns. Counselors say the changes are sending even more students their way, which is both welcome and a challenge, given that many still lack the resources to handle their growing workloads.

Behind those changes, colleges have edged away in the last year from decades-old practices that made student privacy paramount. Now, they are more likely to err on the side of sharing information — with the police, for instance, and parents — if there is any possible threat to community safety. But even some who say the changes are appropriate worry it could discourage students from seeking treatment.

Concerns also linger that the response to shooters like Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech and Steven Kazmierczak, who killed five others at Northern Illinois University, has focused excessively on boosting the capacity of campus police to respond to rare, terrible events. Such reforms may be worthwhile, but they don’t address how to prevent such a tragedy in the first place.

It was last April 16, just after 7 a.m., that Cho killed two students in a Virginia Tech dormitory, the start of a shooting spree that continued in a classroom building and eventually claimed 33 lives, including his own.

Cho’s behavior and writing had alarmed professors and administrators, as well as the campus police, and he was put through a commitment hearing where he was found to be potentially dangerous. But when an off-campus psychiatrist sent him back to the school for outpatient treatment, there was no follow-up to ensure he got it.

People who work every day in the campus mental health field — counselors, lawyers, advocates and students at colleges around the country — put the changes they have seen since the Cho shootings into three broad categories.

UIdentifying troubled students. Faculty are speaking up more about students who worry them. That’s accelerating a trend of more demand for mental health services that was already under way before the Virginia Tech shootings.

Professors “have a really heightened level of fear and concern from the behavior that goes on around them,” said Ben Locke, assistant director of the counseling center at Penn State University.

David Wallace, director of counseling at the University of Central Florida, said teachers are paying closer attention to violent material in writing assignments — warning bells that had worried Cho’s professors.

“Now people are wondering, ’Is this something that could be more ominous?”’ he said. “’Are we talking about the Stephen Kings of the future or about somebody who’s seriously thinking about doing something harmful?”’

Mississippi State and the University of Kentucky are among the schools creating teams involving people such as resident advisers, teachers, administrators and campus police to try to identify troubled students. Others, including Virginia Tech, that already used such “care” teams have added another layer to deal with those identified as potentially threatening.

“People who have been really depressed and are thinking about hurting themselves, these folks I think are coming to our attention a little bit earlier,” said Keith Anderson, staff psychologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “Because it’s been a kind of national awakening, we have a sense of hope people will refer folks before something gets out of control.”

Meanwhile, a recent MTV/Associated Press survey found 12 percent of college students found “life was not worth living” at least sometimes. About 10 percent have considered suicide in the last 12 months, according to the American College Health Association, and more than 1,000 commit suicide annually.

UPrivacy. In Virginia, a measure signed into law Wednesday by Gov. Tim Kaine requires colleges to bring parents into the loop when dependent students may be a danger to themselves or others. Even before Virginia Tech, Cornell University had begun treating students as dependents of their parents unless told otherwise — an aggressive legal strategy that gives the school more leeway to contact parents with concerns without students’ permission.

In Washington, D.C., meanwhile, federal officials are trying to clarify privacy guidelines so faculty won’t hesitate to report potential threats.

“Nobody’s throwing privacy out the window, but we are coming out of an era when individual rights were paramount on college campuses,” said Brett Sokolow, who advises colleges on risk management. “What colleges are struggling with now is a better balance of those individual rights and community protections.”

The big change since the Virginia Tech shootings, legal experts say, is colleges have shed some of their fear of violating the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). Many faculty hadn’t realized that the law applies only to educational records, not observations of classroom behavior.

UStigma. As news of the Virginia Tech shootings broke, Erica Hamilton was one of many people who worried the violence could prompt a backlash against the mentally ill, discouraging treatment and leading to misguided new laws.

“I was really nervous,” said Hamilton, a student at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro who works with Active Minds, a mental health advocacy group with chapters at 127 colleges. “It shined a negative light on people who have mental illness.”

On balance, Hamilton says that hasn’t happened. But the tone of some of the debate remains a concern.