Some brief thoughts, most about the Virginia Tech shootings. Most are interrelated, but some kind of aren’t.

• Postmortem diagnosis of someone you’ve never met is stupid and pointless. This doesn’t mean that I’m entirely uninterested in it (hey, I have a copy of Touched with Fire, too), but I doubt its usefulness.
• I’m a good Canadian girl and I like gun control. I am not very interested in discussing this point any further in general, and I’m certainly not interested in doing so right now.
• I am shocked and appalled that Virginia Tech didn’t lock down campus and cancel classes after the first shooting incident at 7 a.m. I have a hard time imagining that a university wouldn’t do that. It’s terrible. I know the police thought they had apprehended the perpetrator, but shouldn’t the university have done something more just in case there was more than one shooter or the police had the wrong guy, which just so happened to be the case? I disagree with a lot of things that one of the universities I attended has done, but I’m positive they would have cancelled classes and done a better job of warning people.
• It is fucking hard to be mentally ill in university, but I think that might have had surprisingly little to do with the Virginia Tech shootings. I’m crazy, I was really ill in university, and most of the treatment I received only made me worse. But I’ve never killed anyone. My mom thinks that better mental health treatment for university students could prevent further mass murders; I don’t necessarily agree. I do think that mental health on campus is a very serious problem, though, and solutions like threatening to kick me out of residence for cutting myself superficially don’t help anyone.
• People have talked about how the people around Cho should have reached out to him. It seems, though, that some people did reach out to Cho while he was at university. He merely ignored and brushed off any attempt at friendliness. It was pretty nice of people to try to talk to him at all, since he scared the shit out of plenty of other people. I like to think I’m a generally nice person, but if there was some guy who followed girls around and repeatedly sent them emails or whatever after they’d asked him to stop, and surreptitiously took photos of girls and blamed it on other guys, and ignored people who spoke to him, well, I don’t see that there’s any problem with me being too scared of him to try to “reach out” to him. (As a side note, one of the guys who raped me, I later found out, had a previous history of stalking other girls when he took classes at the local university. This was not at the same university I have referred to previously, we were not on campus when he raped me, and he was not even a student when he raped me… but he did later get a part time job on that campus, despite the previous complaints that he was a stalker.)
• I do think, however, that Cho really could have used some compassion when he was younger. Maybe if his peers and other people had been kinder to him in high school, or junior high school, or elementary school, it would have helped him and he wouldn’t have become the twisted person he eventually did become.
• Since I’m very fond of freedom of speech and freedom of expression, it doesn’t bother me that Cho Seung-Hui’s plays were violent, profane, and bizarre. It bothers me that they were poorly-written and pointless as well as being violent, profane, and bizarre. This is not me poking fun at bad writing; this is me writing badly myself as I fail utterly in my explanation of why I do agree that they were somewhat disturbing. Mainly I guess, they seemed like the kind of thing that someone who’s 23 should have moved way beyond.
• In theory, I have absolutely nothing against the idea of briefly hospitalizing someone involuntarily if she is judged to be in imminent danger of harming herself or others. In theory, I am all for this. In practice, sometimes it even saves lives… but other times it’s extremely damaging. I could go on and on about this, but since it wouldn’t fit into point form, I’ll have to get back to it another day.
• People are responsible for their actions unless they are so completely psychotic that they honestly can’t tell right from wrong. You know, the legal definition of insanity. This doesn’t happen all that often. I have been that way only once, and this one time where I had zero chance of controlling myself lasted only for minutes. I had been psychotic nearly constantly for several months at that point, but the actual insanity lasted only minutes.
• At that point, I snapped back to being 99% out of control. And at 99% out of control rather than 100%, you are responsible for your actions. At that point, it’s extremely difficult to talk yourself out of things you’re about to do, but it’s not impossible. At that point, psychosis is an explanation for your actions, but it’s not an excuse.
• I am generally harder on myself than I am on anyone else. Additionally, not being in anyone else’s head, I don’t know how I’d judge whether they were 99% or 100% out of control. But if I did have a way to judge that, I’d hold other people to the same standards of responsibility to which I hold myself.

This afternoon, I was talking to my mother. She’s been talking to an acquaintance who was recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and she’s been thinking about the Virginia Tech shootings, and she’s also getting worked up about the college mental health crisis. Specifically, she was talking about how irresponsible the psychiatrist at the student health centre at one of the universities I attended was, but since I don’t feel like getting into that right now, here’s something that’s at least tangentially related.

This is the non-story of how I could have gotten kicked out of my university residence merely for cutting myself. The residence life manager gave me the following letter on December 8, 1999:

Dear Polly,

Since January 1999 the residence staff, particularly [name of residence assistant], RA, have been working with you in trying to help you cope with the stresses that have been present in your life. I am aware that you have been seeking help from both Psychiatrists and Counsellors and I am very pleased to see you take the initiative in helping yourself through these difficult situations. However, I am also aware that there are still certain behaviours that you have engaged in both last semester and currently this semester that have me concerned. Firstly, I am concerned for your well being and safety, and secondly I am concerned for the well being of the community of [name of residence]. Examples of behaviours which are unacceptable in the residence community and have to stop immediately are:
• cutting yourself using razor blades or other means
• lying in the elevator or other common areas in a state of depression
• taking an overdose of medication

Polly, the intent of this letter is to put forth a contract that I feel must be adhered to for the well being of not only yourself, but the [name of residence] community as well. I encourage you to continue to obtain help from your Doctor and Counselling Services in order to be able to live by the guidelines as stated here in this contract and remain a resident of [name of residence].

Sincerely,
[name]
Residence Life Manager

Behavioural Contract
I understand the behaviours as set forth in this letter will not be tolerated in the residence community. I agree to abide by these terms and conditions and I am aware that any breach of the contract above will result in the termination of my Residence Agreement.

________________
(signature)

________________
(date)

I signed the contract because it seemed less humiliating than fighting against it would have been. I know I should have stood up for my rights, but I didn’t.

Did this contract help me? No, it did not. I don’t even think it helped the university. My very first thought upon reading the contract was how much I wanted to die. It made me realize that the residence life manager, who I used to confide in, did not actually care if I got better, she just wanted to keep me from disrupting everyone else’s lives. I never did lie on the floor of the elevator again, but I only did that once in the first place and I never would have done that again anyway because I realized how phenomenally stupid it was. I kept cutting, but I made sure to always wear long sleeves whenever I left my room. I stopped talking to the residence life manager and my RA about my problems.

I made it through the rest of the school year without being kicked out of residence. When I returned in the fall, I was told that I was expected to abide by the same contract. No, wait — they actually sent a letter to my home address telling me this. Luckily, I checked the mail that day and found the letter before anyone else in my family did. I don’t think my parents would have been mad at me, but I still would have been embarrassed to have them read it.

I still cut, and I still hid my self-injury from The Powers That Be in residence. TPTB found out about my near-fatal overdose in December of 2000, of course — you can’t really hide the near-fatal ones that land you in the hospital for three weeks — but they didn’t have to kick me out of residence because by that point, I had already told them that I planned to transfer to another university in January. And I did.

You can’t fire me, because I quit.

The challenge of coping with a mental illness while in university is one of the issues I’m most concerned about, since it’s something I spent eight years doing, sometimes well, other times not well at all. Since I don’t want to write a half-assed post about such an important subject, I’m not going to do any thinking tonight and instead provide you with a few links:

Susan posts about The College Mental Health Crisis and luckymud mentions an interesting tidbit re: same.

Syd and Nurse Ratched worry that the Virginia Tech shootings will, in Nurse Ratched’s words, “feed into the belief that everyone with a mental illness is a danger to society. This belief is the farthest thing from the truth, but unfortunately, many people suffering from mental illnesses are going to suffer as a consequence of yesterday’s tragic events.” I would be very surprised if she and Syd were wrong.

Note to self: on the subject of protecting students vs. civil liberties, I must remember to blog someday about How I Almost Got Kicked out of My University Residence for Cutting Myself. It’s a much less interesting story than you’d think, barely a story at all, so don’t get excited.

But I’m still bitter about it.

As for basic information on coping with mental illness throughout your post-secondary education, especially in Canada, there is Your Education - Your Future, a guide to college and university for students with psychiatric disabilities from the Canadian Mental Health Association. It was created in 2004 and isn’t entirely up-to-date, though — for instance, I noticed that the information about grants for students with disabilities is out of date. Try this page for correct information about the Canada Study Grant for the Accommodation of Students with Permanent Disabilities and the Canada Access Grant for Students with Permanent Disabilities. Yes, people with bipolar disorder are eligible for the second one even if they don’t have any learning disabilities or stuff like that. And it can really come in handy when you’re on a locked ward and the person in the registrar’s office that you talk to on the phone says if you drop two courses when you get out of the hospital, you can get your money back for them even if it’s after the official deadline, and then when you get discharged the day after the deadline, you drop the two courses but still have to pay $1600 for these courses you aren’t taking, even though the person you talked to said you wouldn’t have to.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’ve had a few job interviews lately. Preparing for them has taken up much of my time. I’ve been pretty enthused about it. Okay, make that REALLY enthused. By which I mean that I stayed awake for over forty hours at one point last week. I’m not worried, though. Maybe I have ideas for a bunch of new projects and I REALLY want to go shopping and one night I purposely didn’t take my pills just ’cause I didn’t wanna, but I’ve been sleeping okay since that forty-hour stretch of wakefulness and I haven’t done anything stupid yet.

Since I recently spent eight years being a mentally ill university student, and also since I’m a human being who cares about other human beings, of course I’m deeply troubled by the Virginia Tech shootings. I don’t know if I’ll have any meaningful commentary on it in the future, and I don’t have any now except to say that my thoughts and prayers go out to those students and their families and friends.