Medical Insight Dim Into the Mind of Cho Seung-Hui

Slate's Dave Cullen, who previously deconstructed the media-generated myths that accrued to Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, takes on the rush to mentally diagnose Cho Seung Hui:

Yet television analysts have Cho deconstructed already: He's a madman, he's a psychopath, a schizophrenic, a psychotic—or maybe just an angry depressive. Experts have rendered definitive diagnoses on every network—and they are wildly contradictory. [...]

Experts from the various disciplines have been coalescing around three possibilities for Cho's underlying condition: depression, psychopathy, or psychosis. Those conditions, often conflated, are extremely different and would offer very different explanations for why Cho killed and what made him snap. [...]

But the best of them are reserving final judgment. "It's hard to diagnose the dead," Ochberg said. "We're going to need more information."

A good point in a great piece -- and one which, if I can be excused for self-referencing, is much in agreement with a post we ran on the rush to explain the killer:

So as we contemplate what happened on the morning of April 16 on the campus of Virginia Tech, wondering who Cho Seung-Hui was and what could have driven him to such madness, explaining his actions as that of a madman, a victim, of someone in control or out of control, an aberration or a symptom of some deep social fault, remember how little we know and how imperfectly we know it. The less we are certain of our own understanding, the more likely we are, eventually, to understand.

Psychopath? Depressive? Schizophrenic? [Slate]

*Image: Roy Mattapallil
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