an acquaintance MD suggested schizophrenia, too.
and now there is this:
And then there is the possibility that Cho was psychotic. Dr. Frank Ochberg, an expert on violence and psychiatry, began to wonder about psychoses when he read Cho's plays. Psychosis is a broad term covering a spectrum of severe mental illnesses, including paranoia and schizophrenia. Psychotics can grow deeply disoriented and delusional, hearing voices and hallucinating. In severe cases, they lose all contact with reality and literally don't know what they are doing. They sometimes act out of imaginary yet terrifying fear for their own safety, or instructions from imaginary beings. Anger management doesn't calm them: They truly cannot help themselves.
Several clues to psychosis jumped out at Ochberg in Cho's plays. The endings particularly interested him: "The bad guy wins," he said. Harris and Klebold wrote and illustrated innumerable fantasies, and whether they were portraying heroic Marines battling aliens or vicious killers knocking off students, their protagonist always triumphed. But Cho's protagonists were crushed. That's a common way for schizophrenics to depict their dark sides triumphing, Ochberg said.
http://www[dot]slate.com/id/2164757
and
Cho Likely Schizophrenic, Evidence Suggests
A Closer Look at the Minds of Mass Shooters
By MICHAEL WELNER, M.D.
April 17, 2007 — - Renowned forensic psychiatrist Michael Welner has examined some of the most notorious mass shooters of recent years. As details emerge about Seung-Hui Cho, the chairman of the Forensic Panel is following the case for ABC News and sharing his insights from his experience and current medical literature. Using the latest informaton, Welner believes the evidence strongly supports that Cho had paranoid schizophrenia.
Are you saying that the shooter was a schizophrenic?
Not enough has been released to tell for sure. Paranoia, in my professional experience, is the most important element to understand in the possible motives of mass shootings. Virtually all mass shooters are paranoid to some pathological degree. Some of them have suspicious personalities but otherwise maintain a connection to reality. Others have paranoid delusional disorder and have irrational and fixed false ideas about a particular theme. The most extreme of those with paranoia have schizophrenia, a condition that may be associated with intense hostility and different degrees of emotional and mental limitation and — particularly important to mass shooting — progressive and humiliating decline and alienation.
What then leads you to believe Cho had schizophrenia?
How he related to his roommate was just too bizarre to be depression. The bizarre content of his plays -- mashing a half-eaten "banana bar" in someone's mouth, the hypersexual, nihilistic (death obsessed) obsessions in the absence of depressive guilt or tearfulness are another clue. The progressive decline of a period of years. Those with schizophrenia, especially in their earliest years, are not readily recognizable as such -- their condition is evolving. But here was someone who, as early as 2005, was carrying himself so strangely that he was a spectacle. The depressed withdraw and disappear. Those who are so peculiar in their manner so as to be inappropriate (taking cell phone pictures of his teacher, speaking inaudibly, pulling a cap low over his eyes) exhibit signs and symptoms more indicative of schizophrenia. He was communicating in a rambling manner reflective of what we appreciate as autistic thinking -- characteristic of schizophrenia. In a similar vein, Mr. Cho's stilted communication in his homicide note (deceitful charlatans -- not the language of a 23-year-old college kid) is also the manner of a schizophrenic's communications, as is his pronounced delay in responding to questions.
http://boards[dot]crimelibrary.com/showthread.php?p=8843088
