Investigating the mentally ill

It is only natural for our society to take precautions in the wake of the Tuscan, Ariz., shooting. The now infamous, Jared Lee Loughner, was, previous to the attack, suspended from Pima Community College for disruptive behavior.

Now, colleges around the nation are once again re-examining their own “threat assessment” procedures. These same threat intervention and prevention teams sprouted up after 2007’s Virginia Tech massacre.

How deep these assessment teams go are unclear and vary from campus to campus. The debate on whether universities should look into students’ mental health records is now a prominent question among our nations post-secondary educational system.

What are students allowed to say and not say in an open forum? And, what if a student chooses to stay out of the social hamlet, keeps to himself, and has to deal, day-to-day, with his mental disorder?

Mental distress alone is not indicative of perilous behavior. There are many students with various mental conditions, including bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, who function perfectly well within social norms.

Yet colleges have grounds for reporting and investigating a student based on a compilation of incidents, including having a mental disorder. At the University of Rochester, N.Y. , staff members can look into a student’s medical records if they fear that such a student could pose a threat.

But having a mental illness does not directly translate to a person being violent or a paranoid psychotic: This is a stigma that society has applied to people with such illnesses. Mentally ill does not mean “insane.”  

So, do the mentally ill get blacklisted just for having a mental disorder or what is considered non-normative thinking and behavior by society?

When it comes to safety, of course college administrations should look into violent threats on and against anyone on campus. However, students should have the right to say if they are opposed to something in society or even about their own government.

Free speech is a First Amendment right, after all. And as for the mentally ill students, colleges should not rely on targeting students with mental disorders, but rather, pay more attention to threatening vernacular and actions that pose an immediate danger.

If as a society we single out the mentally ill, then we only enforce more stigmatization, which leads to people with mental disorders not seeking out support, like IU’s Counseling and Psychological Services, in fear of what their peers will think and how they will act differently around them.

Instead of turning college campuses into super-surveillance communities, which find high-risk students based on criteria focusing on one’s mental health, colleges will hopefully inspire a safe net of support options that are made clear and readily accessible for everyone, like CAPS, as well as a strongly defined anti-violence rhetoric promoting resolute civility.


E-mail: mfiandt@indiana.edu