I would highly encourage anyone feeling depressed to seek counseling, and for the most part school mental health services are a safe and welcoming place to find help. With that being said, DO NOT share information about your mental health status with non-medical staff at school, as they are not bound by the same rules as physicians and can act on that information. My (unsubstantiated and hopeful) guess is that this is likely what actually led to this student's dismissal.
It's a terrible loophole that needs to be closed. In the meantime, it seems we can't in good conscience encourage people to use their on-campus counselors for mental health crises. (And the off-campus counselors are going to be more expensive, such that people you warn off the on-campus ones might just get no help at all.) :/
Here's an example of a college administration obtaining therapist records to use in their legal defense, under FERPA after the student sued them: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2015/03/09/391876192/college...
In this day and age, I would be very, very careful about who you talk to about any kind of mental health issues. Get a reference from somebody you know and trust who has received direct care from the professional in question. Preferably more than one and never from a school. Make sure it's someone you pay directly, NOT a school counsellor. I appreciate you wanting depressed people to seek help, but sometimes dealing with it yourself is better than dealing with the system.
In theory yes, in practice it's easy to make something up, here it's mostly "company internal reasons", which they don't have to justify.
The formal reason will never be that someone sucked at their job.
Virginia is no hero for mentally ill people. Some people are homeless and without income because of mental illness, and until this year, the only "medicaid" available for those people (who did not care for children) were sterilization services (see "Plan First" at VA DMAS.) This means that the eugenics program against mentally ill people that Virginia is known for is still ongoing - it's merely only optional now. Virginia has closed the majority of their state mental institutions and leave these cases to be dealt with by the criminal justice system: basically the theory is to let them devolve into criminal activity then send them to prison.
I think that some mental illness is the result of child abuse. Although child abuse and neglect have been statutorily defined as criminal acts, they are not meaningfully prosecuted in practice. Since the mid-1970's, it has been the law that a wide classification of government employees, from school employees to police officers, are bound by law to report any suspicions of child abuse, but in practice none of them do that, and until several years ago, these employees were liable to no criminal penalties for ignoring that law. I have tried to find cases of people prosecuted for violating this, and have found none.
I think that WMU's influence over the state government is ridiculous and the results of it are disgusting. The school does not deserve its stellar reputation. I would not feel the least bit of sorrow if it were dissolved.
http://www.splc.org/blog/splc/2013/04/transparency-tuesday-c...
If so that is crazy..Cheating on a test is not "illegal." There are a whole host of things that are "against school policy" but not illegal.
I find this very hard to believe....
It's a blatant breach of privacy and medical confidentiality. Comparing it to "cheating" is actually fairly despicable. We're not talking about malicious or manipulative behaviour, we're talking about someone suffering from an illness who took action to find treatment.
> and ban him from College grounds
is ridiculous.
And had they not dismissed him and he continued on and something to that effect were to happen would we not see stories about friends and families of victims asking about why they would have allowed an obviously deeply disturbed person to remain on campus?
Maybe the counselor thought (erroneously?) this particular problem was too big to handle?
How can you understand this that way? I can't.
I can't understand it because I know lots of people with depression, and I've experienced it once myself, never once did anybody I know or myself or for that matter, a reported case, ever think "I know, lets go and kill a bunch of people."
I don't understand it...
The number of dehumanizing things that have been done in the name of "health and safety" is staggering. Life begins with birth and ends with death, use compassionate reasoning in between, there's always a rule or formalism to hide behind.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/germanwings-crash-i-have...
It's really weird seeing such obviously fallacious thinking on HN but it happens everytime mental illness and violence comes up.
When you want to predict if a person poses a risk of violence to other people knowing whether that person has a mental illness or not gives you very little predictive power. Knowing if that person is addicted to alcohol, or has had a previous episode of violence, gives you much more predictive power. And if you combine those, or either or both of them with mental illness you get a better predictor. But mental illness itself is not a predictor.
(Or, lets say, it is another parameter to watch for when discussing with new people, to help understand their point of view and ponder all the arguments, even the ones with more than sufficient counter arguments to outright dismiss them; this excercise might have to be shown to some discussion partners as well so they can see where I am coming from.)
The guy who plunged his plane into a mountain had depression.
The Unabomber was a mathematician.
Hitler was an artist.
But we're talking about a college student. Sure, maybe he shouldn't be allowed in the chemistry lab or given roof access, but what does banning him from college grounds prevent that he can't do outside of it?
Besides, if he was so dangerous to warrant banning him from college grounds just so he couldn't get a chance to harm or kill others (e.g. strap bombs to himself and blow people up), he was probably too dangerous to rely on him to respect the ban. This is the point where you involve the police instead of risking to provoke him further -- and then this isn't just a mental issue, it's a direct threat. But as it seems, this wasn't what happened, even remotely.
1: I don't get why they would bar him from campus.
-Unless the councilor thought that he was also a danger to others.
I’m saying that I agree but that maybe they (erroneously) saw something more than depression or something different from your situation. Given that what exactly is the issue?
(I hope you did not read me as objecting to your comment, just "expanding the picture")
To understand how someone could exclude someone from campus with depression, I'd have to start positing the existence of events / information we don't have. Usually if a health care professional decides they are a danger to others, that is when people get sectioned. This is common place stuff. Virginia Tech is not common place stuff.
Maybe the people at Virginia Tech were depressed or something, I don't know. But, so what?
Hitler was an artist.
There's always the "historical psycho" exception to every rule.
Mathematics causes Unabombers?
These events are in the popular imagination, but it's a reaction coming from fear. In cases like depression it's particularly important for people around a person to act from compassion, open-ness etc. Just "being there" is enough.
Saying "I'm here..." is enough, you have no idea how a small thing like that can make a world of difference without you feeling like it's even a thing you had to give.
From the time they first identify the risk, all further actions seem to focus on washing their hands and distancing themselves from that risk. Rather than helping him themselves, they rush him out the door to a dedicated facility; they forbid him from being on campus, thus ensuring that if things go wrong it'll be on somebody else's watch; and they drag their feet about letting him back into the system.
Just my opinion, but the appearance is that their primary concern was to stay out of liability's way; the actual danger to a student was secondary at best.
The final response of the school to Cassie is also saddening and revealing of a culture devoid of any empathy.
On the other hand, assuming he went to the counselling center first thing in the morning, that's roughly nine hours minus travel time, scheduling, and all the other steps involved in this kind of decision. I find it difficult to believe that a counsellor met with him for more than an hour.
Further: "My brother is then taken home and the next day starts at our local mental health facility. He voluntarily enters a residential program, which is very hard ordeal for both him and my parents. However, he does well and is released to out-patient status on Monday, March 30, 2010." The residential program released him after less than two weeks. I suspect they would not do so if they believed him to be a threat.
So, why did the College initially deny him re-admittance?
And they may have protected the other students at the cost of selling out the integrity of therapy in general. Think of a judge, given the smoking gun needed to convict a murderer that was obtained by unconstitutional means. He must let the murderer go because, while releasing the murder introduces risks to the public, the risk of not upholding the Constitution is even greater.
As it stands, I would no more advise someone to see a therapist than I would advise them to tell everything to a defense lawyer in a country where the defense lawyer tells everything to the prosecutor and it is all admissible in court.
Likely there was something extremely dramatic about this case that made the college believe he was a clear threat to himself and/or others if he stayed at the college.
In what world is banning someone from college the right approach to handle someone with obvious mental issues disclosing his problems in a counseling center?
If his situation was "more extreme", the first course of action should be to escalate the situation to more qualified, not the college administration (who are neither qualified nor relevant). You can still kick someone out after they're in professional treatment.
It's extreme irresponsible to not just refuse treatment but actually measurably make their situation worse. You might as well hand them a razor and tell them "yes, you're right, take this and go kill yourself" while you're at it.
Any potential threat of negative repercussions only serves to destroy trust between a potential client and any therapist.
Imagine what would happen if people with AIDs had their info put into a public database (especially back when fear of the disease was much higher)? It would have destroyed not only the trust of those with or who might have AIDs, but of many people with other health concerns as well.
If so you can't really blame them.
Our college handled this differently and perhaps it was due to my strong advocate since my brother took his own life when I was a kid. We required hospitalization for the hospital to evaluate and than we would work one on one to make sure they were following doctor's orders in terms of counseling and medications. This all had to be done secretly so that students privacy wasn't stolen and that students would know it was a safe place.
As a Resident Director we would directly contact the professors and arrange a way for the student to make up their work and to complete the classes. usually the students would have a lot of abstinence and this would cause an issue, but we would always try our best and set up things in place for the next semester if need be and with financial assistance (AKA not charge them for the class credits a second time).
> He goes to the counselling centre but instead of offering any help, they call my mom to come down and then at 5 p.m. that day, hold a meeting with a dean and five other staff where they promptly dismiss my brother from William and Mary and ban him from College grounds.