LESSONS FROM VIRGINIA TECH: PAY CLOSER ATTENTION TO OUR POETS

As we begin our recovery from the horror of what occurred at Virginia Tech just a week ago, we look at the lessons learned from this tragedy for all humanity. Mental health professions both at the university and at a major hospital near by judged this future killer of 32 people to be merely depressed and no threat to others, but one person thought otherwise and that was poet and university professor Yolanda Cornelia “Nikki” Giovanni.

Not only did Nikki Giovanni ask that the future mass murder be removed from her class, but she sought protection from the police to ensure her personal safety. Giovanni saw in this severely disturbed person who happened to be her student far more than the depression and suicidal tendencies that was all the so-called professionals saw. She saw the would-be mass murderer. She saw the evil.

Professionals Need Retraining

Lesson one from this tragedy then is that our mental health professionals need to be more alert to psychopathology. Lesson one is that most of our mental health professionals need retraining. Only a small number of people who exhibit mental disorders are any more than threats to themselves, but the fact is that that one exception can do an enormous amount of harm in a society in which weapons, including automatic weapons, are so freely available.

For one thing, mental health professionals need to learn that one of their major jobs is the protection of the public, and they need better diagnostic tools to ferret out the psychopath from those who are just depressed and suicidal. The fact is that one highly intelligent and sensitive person, namely the poet Nikki Giovanni, saw far worse than simply depression and suicidal tendencies in this student who sat before her and shared some of his inmost thoughts with her through his writing.

Did They Talk to Nikki Giovanni?

Did any of the mental health professionals who were charged with evaluating this student ever talk to Nikki Giovanni, and if they did why didn’t they take her concerns and her fears more seriously? Let us remember that this future mass murderer was also accused of stalking two female students. Stalking is an act perpetrated against another. It is an insight into psychopathology whether the two female students pressed charges or not.

As regular readers of Mind Check know, I have spent considerable effort in this blog on the subject of evil. In this respect, I have been aided by my readings of the writings of the great psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, who we lost in 2005. Our contemporary psychiatrists and other mental health workers need to start by reading or perhaps rereading M. Scott Peck, and they need to take his work very seriously. Yes, the evil do walk among us, and they are capable of immense destruction.

Liviu Librescue Remembered

Before closing this installment of Mind Check, I want to call attention to the loss of Liviu Librescue, age 76, as part of this tragedy and thus pay my respects to this survivor of the holocaust and engineering and mathematics lecturer at Virginia Tech. Among the 32 innocent victims of this horrific act of evil, Librescue died blocking the door to his classroom and thus protecting his students from the madman outside. Monday, April 16, the day of the massacre at Virginia Tech, was Holocaust Remembrance, and it was on such a day as that that Liviu Librescue gave his life so that others might live. I stand in awe before such an act of self sacrifice and heroism.

ABOUT MIND CHECK

Thank you for tuning into Mind Check, a biweekly effort to prove that we are what we think and that clear thinking leads to effective action and to a better world. Mind Check is intended to serve as a bridge between the realm of the human spirit, that center of our energy, mental and physical, and our rationality or reason, of which the scientific method is an excellent example. Mind Check is also intended to prove that the ideas of right and wrong are innate, not exclusively inherent in the situation or the whim of the moment.

To communicate with the author of Mind Check, please write to stephen.saft@gmail.com. For examples of the writer’s other writings, see the website http://www.iwillmeanpoetry.com. The author is also preparing to launch a site of podcasts consisting of spoken poetry, essays and short stories. Be on the look out for it.

Copyright © 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft