Virginia Tech: Day 4

I want this to be the last thing I post about this matter. When the incident first took place, I was glued to the media sources, trying to get information. Part curiosity, part kinship to a sister institution. But now we have had too much information; we know too much. Every major channel had their morning reporters broadcasting from the campus, talking to students who didn't need to be constantly rehashing the events of April 16th. After awhile it seemed like the reporters were too eager, like their empathy was overcome by their macabre desire to tell the story. And then the constant retelling of the story, adding little details, bit by bit, until finally we had the taped manifesto from the killer.

He clearly was mentally ill. The question I have at this point is: could his life have been salvaged? Or was he just someone who needed to be locked away? The treatment of the mentally ill has changed so much in the last one hundred years. We don't just lock people away anymore and forget them like we did in the past, but the present-day treatment of the mentally ill seems like a mere bandaid sometimes.

I have had some contact with people who needed insitutional treatment over my years as a lawyer. I remember the first criminal case I was ever appointed to, in Stephens County when I first began the practice of law. The defendant had taken a pickup truck off the street and driven away. No harm had been done; they just found the truck parked in front of his house. He seemed normal until you talked to him for an extended time. Then the twists and turns of his diseased mind became apparent, even to someone like me who had no formal training in such matters. He told me that he took the pickup truck because it had his name on the back bumper. The judge shipped him off to Columbus to the West Central Georgia Mental Hospital. Did they give him some pills and send him back home to Toccoa? That's what they had done several times before.

Sometimes I wonder how far we have come with the treatment of the mind. We may never know how much is treatable and how much is not. We are not machines that you can fix like you work on an automobile. We are more fluid than that. A troubled soul is complicated and ever-changing. The ministry to a soul is an art rather than a science. There are too many variables and causes and effects. One needs to be a doctor and a pastor at the same time.

What is normal?