I stand corrected re: VT being a private university. Nevertheless, the right to a public education in this country ends at Grade 12. No one has an inalienable "right" to attend college.

Mental illness often emerges and/or peaks in the teenage years and in young adulthood. Every college campus has a small percentage of mentally ill students, some with severe mental illness.

Yes, we are all to blame as a society for the way we care for and treat mentally ill people, but institutions that deal with young people share a somewhat larger portion of this blame.

They are face to face with suicidal, disturbed and homicidal people perhaps more regularly than managers in the workplace. If a student is dangerous, or appears dangerous, an institution has a responsibility to protect its students and faculty and remove the student from the school. A student, sane or insane, has no "right" to be at a place of higher learning.

Would Cho have gone out on the streets and shot up ordinary citizens if he was dismissed from Virginia Tech? Perhaps, but perhaps not. Perhaps he would have snapped at home and killed only himself or fewer people.

My sibling was dismissed from a college when she started acting strangely. Her psychotic breakdown occurred at home a week later. The police were called, and so began her and our family's journey through the mental health system.

The story of the parents who had to put their son in foster care is tragic. But unfortunately, parents or relatives are often the only ones who fully understand the dangers posed by a mentally ill relative.

Interestingly, Cho signed himself into a hospital two years ago when the school acted forcefully (not forcibly) to remove him from the campus.

We care so much about ourselves and our interests and our political correctness and how we look to others and whether there's a 'stigma' to this and that - and we care so very little about what's really important: the welfare of the ill person and those around him.

Just to set the record straight, Sylvia Segrist is not in a mental institution; she lives in a prison in Pennsylvania. Although not as paranoid, delusional and dangerous as she once was, she is still ill. She has not seen her mother in several years, at her request. Her mother is an advocate for the mentally ill.

The reality is that many or most schizophrenic people don't get better. They can greatly improve with the help of medications, but they are not high functioning people with good jobs. Some people manage just fine on disability and a part-time job, others are severely handicapped. I wish people understood how serious schizophrenia is and that it's a lifelong handicap.

We have not yet discovered a good drug for this illness. If we downplay the reality of mental illness, we do a great disservice to the sufferer. We don't sugarcoat descriptions of pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer, congestive heart failure and Lou Gehrig's disease.

People need to understand what it's like to live with a mental illness. It is a life of great suffering for the person who has it. The more we understand that people with this awful disease are not just like you and I, and that they need special help, support, and treatment, the less suffering we'll have in this world.

You and I don't live with voices that torment us day and night. Or frightening delusions that are like dreams spilling into reality.

We don't stigmatize mental illness by telling it like it is, because that's how we develop compassion.

Sylvia Segrist's life isn't as great as the previous letter writer says it is. I saw the Web site where he/she got the information. It's a second-hand source.

Seegrist