gav_73

Hi gang,

I know all of you are aware of the terrible tragedy that happened at Virginia Tech this week. If you have been following the news - it's difficult not to - you also know that there has been lots of talk about what the school, doctors and others could have done to predict this killer's behavior. There has been lots of talk about depression and the "signs" of mental illness. There has also been talk about changing the laws that protect our privacy - by people who are insensitive to others with mental illness, people who do not consider the rights of millions of people, like us, who suffer from mental illness who have never, and would never conceive of doing any harm to anyone.

Am I the only one who feels the fear of impending doom, the fear of a "***** hunt" mentality developing in this country against those of us who suffer from any form of mental illness? After all, it only takes a strong majority to change the laws that protect all of us. I am very disturbed by the direction the political ideologues are spinning the discussion.

I do, of course, believe that if anyone exhibits signs of hurting anyone else or themselves, observers have a responsibility to act. However, I am saddened that people believe that the answer is to take away the rights of all of us, who already have to deal with the stigma and ridicule that goes along with mental illness. It's a slippery slope, and we need to remain vigilant to ensure that our rights are not taken away from us during this sad and scary time. I mean, it wasn't long ago that students in high schools all over the South were banned from wearing black clothes, or accused of worshipping the devil for being different. Is it so far a leap that it couldn't happen to us?

Curiously, with all the news coverage about "warning signs" and what could have been done, not one person has said anything about our culture, how people should learn to be nicer and more compassionate and understanding to the people who are different than they are, to embrace them rather than shun them. They interviewed the teachers and professors who said they tried to intervene when the killer exhibited violence in his writings. One said she reached out to other professors, trying to alert others about his strange behavior. What's interesting is that never in any of her interviews did she say she tried to confront him, to take him aside and talk to him, to ask him if he needed help or to talk to someone about what he was feeling; never did she say that she talked to him at all, not as a mentor or to lend him a helping hand in what was apparently a very dark time in his life. No talk of interraction at all on her part. What she did, her instinct, was to turn him in and ask someone else to intervene. No one did. One act of kindness can often go a long way. But no one has talked about kindness; everyone talks around it as if being kind to people who are different or lonely or unpopular is so far beyond our imagination that we must look to other mechanisms to solve social problems, to prevent them. It's very curious indeed.

I am not, in any way, trying to excuse what this maniac did or to minimize the impact and sadness of his actions and the poor families' heartache and fears. I am just worried that, in all of the grieving and finger pointing, that we, the people on this board and others like us, could lose our rights to privacy. That would be another tragedy in and of itself, and I don't want that to happen.