Rules block instinct to help others

OK, I've read the 260 pages filed by the review panel that investigated the Virginia Tech shootings, and I understand that the university should have stepped in to help Seung Hui Cho but didn't, that Cho's parents should have alerted the college to his condition but didn't and that the state mental health system should have acted more decisively but didn't.

Here's what I don't get. In the hundreds of interviews the panel conducted, why didn't they ask all those people whose job it is to care for students one question: How would you have handled Cho if you had let your conscience, not privacy laws, guide you?

Maybe they didn't ask because we all know the answer, and it is a most discomfiting one. If the mental health professionals, police and college administrators who saw or knew about Cho's disturbing actions had acted as if their own child were involved, there might not have been any need for an investigation.

Boil down the report, cast aside the pointless second-guessing of police tactics, and you're left with this: Virginia Tech failed to intervene to help Cho because we as a society have trapped ourselves inside rules that stigmatize mental illness and paralyze our natural instinct to reach out and help someone in need.

This is no theoretical exercise in hindsight. This is a direct comparison between what some people did and what others didn't. At Virginia Tech, students who were frightened by their encounters with Cho took action. They told adults in positions of authority. The responsible adults then met and, in the words of the report, "did nothing." Why? "Lack of resources, incorrect interpretation of privacy laws and passivity," the panel concludes in its report.

Now compare what the Fairfax, Va., school system did and what Virginia Tech failed to do. In 1999, when Cho was in eighth grade, his teachers noticed, as Tech professors would later, that the youngster was thinking seriously about suicide and homicide. The boy wrote, the report says, that he "wanted to repeat Columbine."

Fairfax acted. The middle school asked Cho's parents to get him counseling. A psychiatric evaluation led to a diagnosis and treatment, which enabled Cho to perform well in school.

Again in high school, Fairfax stepped in and developed a plan for dealing with Cho's silences and other unusual behaviors. With therapy, he improved.