I don't know if we can make too many judgments about the teachers. We may not know exactly what happened from the coverage we hear, and as I recall some teachers were hurt. I can imagine a situation where the kids would have nobody to help them get out of the room if the teacher jumped a guy with a knife and got himself dead. There's too much we don't know yet to start questioning someone's courage in a situation like that.
If this guy's diagnosis of schizophrenia is correct he may well not be responsible for what he did. Then again,he may. I have had schizophrenic patients who became irritable and violent because of severe delusions which fade when they're treated. I've also come across patients who were psychopaths before the schizophrenia hit. Sometimes they've been sharp enough to use their symptoms as an excuse, but for the most part you can detect that. Schizophrenics' voices don't usually say things like "Beat that guy over the head so you can steal his money and get some crack." This sort of random, unmotivated attack does sound like something that might come from psychosis, though.
One of the problems with this is that this kind of severe violence is exceedingly rare among people with psychiatric illnesses. You're a lot more likely to be killed by a sane person than someone with schizophrenia. When someone with schizophrenia is violent, though, it's often this sort of bizarre crime and gets a lot of press.
Schizophrenics can do very well when they take their medicine. As a part of the illness, though, they almost never know that they are sick. It's a striking aspect of the disease that someone can be raging delusional and hallucinated and have no idea whatsoever that there's anything wrong with him.
This makes the cries of "Why wasn't this guy locked up before this happened?" tough for those of us in the trenches. When in the hospital, even very sick schizophrenics can regain their self-control and the delusions and hallucinations usually fade out with treatment. They often don't take their medicine when they leave because they don't think they need it. Even if they don't take the medicines, it's next to impossible to predict rare events like this kind of violence. The vast majority of people respond to treatment, and the vast majority of schizophrenics wouldn't hurt a fly. Our best ability to predict this sort of thing happening would be (for example) to say this guy has a 1 in 100,000 chance of doing something like this, as opposed to the 1 in 10,000,000 risk of any other schizophrenic. The question is, do you lock up people who have a 0.001% chance of being violent for the rest of their lives, depriving them of what life they could have with this illness?
There were a lot of victims of this. One of them's going to be in prison or some other institution for the rest of his life. I hope it isn't prison if this was motivated by delusions, which I think it was, but institutionalization probably is the best thing for the poor bastard.
I'd like to believe that this is going to wake people up to how important it is to put together an integrated system of care for people with these sorts of illnesses, instead of the kind of "hospitalize when they're nearly dead or do something bad, throw onto street and pray they show up for the next appointment when they show a glimmer of improvement" system we have in the Land of the Free at the moment. I know it won't, though. We've been here before. He'll be kept in a little room somewhere, and everybody will forget about it till the next time.
Sorry to be getting a little bitter, folks. This involves some people I care very much about, and strikes close to the heart.
I mourn for all the victims of this vile disease, and I'm doing what I can about it.
