Pscyprof: I appreciate your comments, but you're not hearing (reading?) me. You are using a very broad definition of 'mental illness' and I am using a narrower one. I don't consider most people on antidepressants to be mentally ill, and I realize you are using that term for students with depression, anxiety, social phobia, neuroses, etc. My letters have not talked at all about people with depression.

When I talk about mental illness, I am talking about the thought disorders - schizophrenia, bipolar disorder - disorders that cause delusions, voices, disorganized thinking. The kind of disorder Cho had.

Schizophrenia affects 1 percent of the world population; I don't know the stats on bipolar disorder.

As you can see from the articles that have come out in the last couple of hours, a judge did declare that Cho was a danger to himself and others. The paperwork indicated he was 'mentally ill' and they required that he be involuntarily committed. It turns out he voluntarily committed himself.

Unfortunately, the facility felt that he could be treated on an outpatient basis.

What I am saying is that, in these circumstances, the school should have contacted the parents and asked them to remove him from the school. He was mentally ill, a danger to others, and a danger to himself.

That's all I'm saying.

My point has not been to boot out people, or to disallow entry to people, who need Lexapro and benzodiazepines to get through the day, but to ask why a college allows people who are are seriously delusional, and by extension, possibly dangerous, to remain on a college campus.

If the mental health system failed Cho, which, of course, it did, as it fails most others, VT should have taken steps to remove him from their school.

This would not have solved the problem of Cho's mental illness, but it could have better protected the campus community.

The media is looking for rational reasons as to why Cho did what he did. There is a sad lack of understanding about serious mental illness - there are no reasons or answers. The mind plays terrible tricks on the sufferer. The reason for the shootings was in his head.

Do you really know why, when you sleep, you have bizarre dreams about people chopping off your arms or legs or about you flying through the air or having perverted sex with acquaintances? This is the human brain when thoughts are unconscious and disorganized. Can you help having these dreams? Are there good reasons for you to have them? Mental illness is like dreams spilling over into reality. When you're sleeping, you think the dreams are real. When mentally ill people are awake, they think their thoughts are real.

If Risperdal and Clozaril really worked on most people, schizophrenic people could leave hospitals, halfway houses and the streets and start thinking rationally.

Schizophrenic people take these drugs. My sister takes both. They are not even close to cures.

You need to spend time in day programs, halfway houses and in homeless shelters to see who mentally ill people are on or off Risperdal and Clozaril. They are very sick.

They share absolutely nothing in common with the depressed students in your classes who shower each day, speak in regular sentences, and, basically...function.

These people are TORMENTED by voices and visions and they are severely disabled.

It boggles the mind to think that people are approaching Cho's writings rationally...He was SICK. There is no external reason for Cho to have done what he did. His mind was chaotic and disordered.

Someone with a mind like this should not be in a college class with your son or daughter.

Anyone who works with mentally ill people or lives with a mentally ill person knows this.

I love my sister; I am the last person to discriminate against anyone. But I have knowledge and information about mental illness, just as the school administration did.

According to a story in today's NY Times, despite the fact that federal laws restrict what universities can reveal, and that "generally," the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act makes it illegal to disclose a student’s records to family members without the student’s authorization--colleges CAN disclose a student’s private records if they believe there’s a health and safety emergency.

Someone in the story was quoted as saying "the health and safety exception hasn’t been much tested in the courts, so it’s left to be figured out case by case."

This is just a guess on my part, but I'd suspect that the number of lawsuits filed by mentally ill students against a school for the school having disclosed information about the student's mental health to his/her parents is closer to zero than to 10.

Does anyone remember Elizabeth H. Shin? Her mental deterioration was well known to classmates and MIT's counseling service before she set herself on fire and killed herself in a dorm. In 2000, her parents sued MIT for $27.7 million--aruging that they had not been told of the extent of her troubling behavior. The case was apparently settled out of court.

If someone is drowning on private property that says "no tresspassing," do you obey the sign or save the person who is drowning?

Do schools really believe that students as ill as Cho would file a lawsuit if they spoke to his parents (or whoever paid the bills for his college education) about his behavior? And if someone like Cho did, in fact, file such a lawsuit, do they really believe they would lose such a case?

The law also says that information can be disclosed to parents and others if the student authorizes such a disclosure. Did they ask Cho if they could speak to his parents? Perhaps he would have said YES. In 2005, he went WILLINGLY to a mental health facility.

In one of his rantings, he said something to the effect that: you had "billions" of chances to stop me.