The Virginia Tech Shooter: Mentally Ill or Evil?

Was Cho Seung-Hui--the shooter identified in the Virginia Tech killings--mentally ill or irreparably evil? Did he suffer from a treatable mood disorder, or was he a psychopath unable to be helped?

It's a theological, psychological, and sociological riddle--an ugly one. Even as the genetic studies of mood disorders continue to pinpoint specific genes that predispose people to those disorders, and the brain-imaging technologies can identify regional patterns of brain activity that distinguish depressed people from non-depressed people, we can't say for now where illness stops and evil begins.

For my own sake, I hope Cho was more psychopathic or fundamentally evil than he was sick, because I'm on a serious mission to educate people about mental illness, and I'd rather not include him in our flock. We already have Andrea Yates and one if not both of the Columbine murderers among our ranks.

Stories of how Cho simply "cracked" frustrate my efforts at explaining my own suicidal depression and two psych ward stays. If I'm mentally ill, does that mean I could supposedly snap at anytime too, and write freaky expressions of my rage--penning a manifesto against the world--and send NBC a video saying that "Jesus loved crucifying me"?

That depends on how we define evil, mental illness, and the murky terrain in between.

"Evil, that's what some call it: mass murder, mass shootings, serial killings," writes Washington Post Staff Writer Neely Tucker in his excellent article, "Dark Matter: The Psychology of Mass Murder." "The shooter on the Texas tower, Charles Manson, the Green River Killer, the Clutter family killers. People search religious texts to divine the dark mysteries of man, looking for a spiritual answer to physical violence. Others delve into psychiatry, grasping for an answer Freud missed, something about childhood violence and sexual dysfunction and rage. Nowadays they trace neurons through the cerebral cortex with glow-in-the-dark chemicals and talk about brain injuries and paranoid schizophrenia and thorazine drips. All anybody has ever found, in the research of evil, is shadows and darkness, misfiring neurons and reverberating psychic pain."
If I label Cho as an incredibly sick individual, then am I contributing to "continued attempts to psychologize and 'understand' such deviance...to avoid applying moral categories of judgment" as Anne Henderschott, professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego suggests? In other words, is labeling him "mentally ill" letting the guy off the hook--kind of like how my sister's 18-year-old neighbor shot his brother and was classified "insane," so instead of serving time, he's drinking Coke and snacking on popcorn inside a rehabilitation center, with more freedom and visitation rights than an incarcerated 40-year-old man who drank some extra beers before driving home?

Instead, maybe the theological language of evil is more useful when describing a person like Cho.

I know from being a Catholic--and a theology major--that the Bible says that we are responsible creatures who are all born with a conscience. According to "Gaudium et Spes," (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, one of the 16 documents of Vatican II): "Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment.... For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God.... His conscience is man's most secret core and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths."

Continued on page 2: 'My own encounter with darkness showed me the fuzzy boundaries between illness and evil...' »