Reverberations from Virginia

This post has been updated to clarify comments cited in the letter to the editor.

Last week, two days after it happened, I hid the newspapers. When four bleary-eyed boys arrived at the breakfast table, only the sports sections were available for consumption along with their cereal.

This is not something we do lightly in our house. But the youngest is a curious and sensitive 11-year-old. Although he was fully aware of what had transpired 48 hours earlier at Virginia Tech University, he didn't need to see a photograph of the perpetrator brandishing his guns on the front pages. Sure, maybe he noticed them on the newspaper boxes when he walked to school. But I couldn't stand the thought of these images strewn around among the latest food and fashion news.

The question of how to limit kids' exposure to violent news media is a tough one for parents in an era when information and pictures travel at light speed and kids can't wait to tell each other the latest developments in the school yard. (This Associated Press story has some hints about that.)

To me, what's equally challenging is helping children and teens decipher the breathless and unceasing TV coverage, columnists' outrage and sensational headlines that they glimpse or hear about at school or from friends. And encouraging them to question it.

Because when the talking heads can't explain the unexplainable, they too often resort to over-the-top rants about evil, wickedness and mental illness all in the same breath. As if we are somehow safer if we can just believe the perpetrator is something other than a person in grave distress. If only we can convince ourselves he or she is a monster separate and apart from the rest of humanity.

Just recall the words used by pundits and news anchors to describe the gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, in the immediate aftermath of the Virginia shootings: demented, deranged, lunatic, evil, "unintelligible moron," to name just a few.

It took almost a week before there was any acknowledgment that Cho's deeply disturbing life story was also a tragedy, and that his family were victims too.

As one irate newspaper reader complained in a letter to the editor, the coverage showed little understanding of mental illness. Rather than presenting it as an illness of the brain, the reader said, it portrayed mental illness as "a wilful choice to do evil."

Some of the most telling lines were buried in many inches of weekend copy about Cho's life story. But they were fodder for our household discussions. From the Globe and Mail:

What the family had undoubtedly hoped for Mr. Cho was a track mirroring that of his sister, who, playing the stock role in an almost stereotypical immigrant success story, was propelled by hard-labouring parents within easy reach of the American Dream.

Instead, Mr. Cho seem to wilt in her shadow, as if stuck in a parallel, failed universe. He was the embodiment of isolation, a loveless man for whom not a single person has come forward to say, "He was my friend."

There was silence in our family room after that passage was read aloud. "Sad. That's so sad," murmured the burly 17-year-old, to whom a life without friends is unfathomable.

A next-door neighbour told the New York Times that when people spoke to Cho, he ignored them as if they were not there. "Like he had a broken heart."

Even as his own mother fretted and prayed over him, other relatives showed disdain toward the silent, haunted child.

"Why couldn't somebody help him?" wondered the 14-year-old curled up beside me on the couch, posing the essential question at the heart of the tragedy - the one question that has no answer.

I read these snippets aloud to my children in an attempt to counter the black-and-white/good-and-evil/monster-versus-human messages so often peddled in the press. Because life - and stories - are much more complicated than that.

You may not believe the perpetrator deserves an ounce of the sympathy accorded his victims. And the details of this story will likely take years to unravel.

But there's one thing you can't argue with, and it's what I hope my kids will remember: Seung-Hui Cho was once a little child, just like the 32 other people whose lives were so tragically cut short. That's something we all have in common.

Comments

[Leslie Feldman]

Dear Andrea,

You may want to explore the issue of how late paternal age mutates DNA in sperm making cells that go into making the nervous system and brain of a baby. The myelin genes are especially vulnerable. Alzheimer's risk as well as autism and schizophrenia rises with paternal age in de novo cases. Your boys may be interested in this. Of course the effect of age depends on what has happened to these genes in prior generations. If one has a family history of autoimmune disorders it seems that schizophrenia and autism are more likely to occur.

http://autism-prevention.blogspot.com/

[Amanda]

As a person who has repeated contact with people suffering from various forms of mental illness and in varying degrees, I know for certain the comment about mental illness being "a wilful choice to do evil" is not true. Any mentally ill person you catch on a coherent day when the voices are quiet or the obsessions or tics have backed off would tell you given the chance, they would do anything to be cured.

The true evil is the lack of supports in place for those that suffering from mental illness. Likewise the lack of assistance for family members who believe a loved one is slipping into mental illness. The Ontario Mental Health Act (which by the way, is 17 years old) really limits options for having someone assessed. And that's just GETTING them to hospital. Once there, you are at the mercy of an overworked underpaid crisis worker, and a harried E.R doctor, or perhaps the on-call psych consult.

IF..and that's a big if, those professionals decide to admit the person, they can only hold them up to 72 hours.

So, perhaps, instead of pointing the finger at the person and claiming they are wilfully committing evil, let's point it at the government who doesn't provide enough facilities or powers for families to get treatment for loved ones possibly suffering from a mental illness.

[Because I Said So]

Thanks Amanda for your comment, which alerted me to the fact that I hadn't adequately explained the letter to the editor cited in my post. That letter, which you can link to, criticized the media for misleading portrayals of mental illness. I have amended the post to clarify that.