The Cho incident fucked me up for about three days

[Droopy]

It's still bothering me. I can't stop writing about it on message boards.

When I first heard of the news I had a good idea of what had happened to Cho to make him commit such a horror. When the video Cho made hit the web and the news I knew it for sure.

For three days I was unable to sleep more than a couple of hours. I could feel the demons of a time past when I was sick crowding in on me. My head felt thick with understanding and depression. I know that all of this may have been avoided if Cho had been given an anti-psychotic when he was hospitalized- and continued to take the medication of course.

At first I sort of blamed the mental health specialists that saw Cho but failed to see his psychosis. Then I talked to a couple of people about it. Some offered the idea that Cho might not have been suffering from psychosis when he was admitted to the hospital. A mental health professional from another board also said that psychosis is not always apparent when a person is suffering from it. Others added that Cho may not have been willing to seek the help that he needed so he kept all of that fucked up shit inside of him.

I don't know how to fix this problem. We need more awareness in the general public about mental illness. That might help some. But how many are out there holding it in like Cho? They may seem a little odd and too quiet, but nobody really knows. They may be loners with a slight criminal history, but nobody can really tell. They could be housewives that seem a little depressed, but how can you commit them just based on that?

That has torn me up. What do you think we could do?

[pitohui]

1. we can arrest people who are threatening others (stalking)

we don't have to worry about persecuting people just for being quiet, we could have enforced the laws against stalking that already exist

two women filed complaints against cho for stalking them, in the year of our lord 2007 it STILL isn't taken seriously when a woman files a complaint aga. a stalker

this isn't a mental health issue or a "let's forcibly incarcerate all quiet people" issue

this is a major systematic failure of our law enforcement system which simply refuses to accept the radical idea that women are people too and that it is a crime to stalk them and make terroristic threats against them

your "too quiet" person may be the person of a different background, such as appalachian, where talking about feelings is just not done, forcing people to get "help" for being quiet is not the answer to anything, it is just a jobs program for phony counselors who think everybody should be chatty cathy because they are

what an ugly society we would have if everyone was an extrovert

cho wasn't a criminal because he was "too quiet," he was a criminal because he was a stalker

[alarimer]

2. It does seem as though the authorities could have prevented this

I saw he was kicked out of a poetry class because none of the female students would go anymore if he was there. But they didn't kick him out of school or anything like that (although that might have made him worse) or call the campus police on him. He was harrassing them and no one did anything.

It seems no one pays any attention to stalkers unless a celebrity is involved.