After Virginia Tech, Seeking Answers

As a psychiatrist who has evaluated potentially dangerous high school students, I believe there are several domains, state and federal, in which we could improve on policies and practices to lessen the risk of horrors such as that at Virginia Tech.

First, our absurdly easy access to guns does not protect us as a society; it makes our communities more dangerous. The conventional wisdom -- that, despite Columbine and now Virginia Tech, no serious gun control is possible -- must be challenged. At the very least, gun sellers should be required to comply with a waiting period before selling guns, to provide time in which to check not only for criminal records but also for records of involuntary mental health evaluation or treatment.

Second, legal criteria on which to base a petition for emergency psychiatric evaluation may need to be modified in some states. For example, before 2003, Maryland required that the individual have a mental disorder and present a "clear and imminent danger of doing bodily harm to [self] or another."

The second criterion now is that "the individual presents a danger to the life or safety of the individual or of others," which allows for broader use of mental health judgment.

Third, a university can develop its own policies about when to suggest, urge or, yes, require mental health treatment as a condition of someone remaining at the university. That could have been useful in the case of a person such as Cho Seung Hui, who, although released from state-mandated evaluation, might have been judged by more careful and comprehensive university-mandated outpatient evaluation to be in need of ongoing outpatient treatment, not just one day of evaluation.

DAVID M. ZWERDLING

Silver Spring

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