Jody,
My day job is a community organizer for a mental health organization and I respectfully say..you are misinformed. Treatment does work. Thousands of people living with severe and persistant mental illness are treated and live amonst us everday. I personal know and work with dozens of people recovering from mental illness and they don't get better than sick as you say.

The vast majority are nothing like this man. His is a rare case when the vast majority (1 in 5 suffer a mental illness by today stats) respond well to treatment. Please don't increase the stigma of mental illness by saying that it is hard to treat, it isn't hard to treat, it is hard to break the stigma and get people treatment!

Joe, I was a therapist and a social worker for 12 years. My first gig was in a public clinic, my second at a long term care center for people with chronic MI and my most recent job was with social services here in Los Angeles. I do not wish to minimize your service, but I worked on the -treatment- end of client services.

Mild depressions, mood disorders and the like are fairly easy to treat. Medication helps people with such illnesses lead normal, ordinary lives. In fact, the help such treatments provide is so certain, sure and complete more should be done to publicize it.

But the severe mental illnesses, the schizophrenias, the paranoid manias and the like, are terribly hard to treat. Medication is a constant battle, with years of victory followed by a draining skirmishes when bodies change and chemical imbalances return.

Without the on-going treatment Cho needed, he fell apart and became a danger to everyone. He needed to be followed far more closely than he was, for his own sake and for ours.

Hi Jody as someone who is a part of the Zoloft Nation (Bipolar & depression) I understood you were talking about SEVERE Mental illness and I agree with your point. I might ask Why is it so difficult for Mental health practitioners to Identify and treat these severely disturbed people? In ALL 9 of the School shootings in the last 15 years Teachers & students KNEW the shooters, they were the ones everyone was "afraid" of. But the MHP's continually drop the ball just like in VA,just like the good Dr, who signed Cho out!Dewayne

Why is it so difficult for Mental health practitioners to Identify and treat these severely disturbed people?

There are lots of reasons, D. In some sense, we still don't count mental health as a medical, treatable condition.

We give people, even kids, yearly physicals. I personally think we need to give yearly mental health physicals too. We need to target problems early and even if people choose not to take medications, there should be a baseline from which to track improvements or declines in functioning. It would be part of a medical record, from which any doctor could look to in the future.

If Cho had been identified much earlier... by all accounts his behavior emerged when he was still an adolescent... as part of his regular medical check-ups, his mental health could have been monitored.

I read the two plays posted on-line. They are in keeping with kids who have had serious abuse in their home life. I have no idea if -Cho- had such abuse, but if I was a social worker investigating, I have a list of questions I'd want answers to.

Could the VT tragedy have been avoided? I don't know. There are though steps that could be taken to diminish the likelihood of such events transpiring in the future.

Gun control / arming the populace, isn't it.

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