Washington – Authorities’ abilities to identify potentially dangerous mentally ill people are crippled across the nation by the same kinds of conflicts in privacy laws that prevented state officials from being able to intervene before Seung-Hui Cho went on his rampage at Virginia Tech, according to a federal report commissioned after the Blacksburg, Va., shootings that was presented Wednesday to President Bush.
Because school administrators, doctors and police officials rarely share information about students and others who have mental illnesses, troubled people don’t get the counseling they need, and authorities often are unable to prevent them from buying handguns, the report says.
The report was released on the day the House of Representatives passed a bill designed to make it more difficult for those with mental-health problems, such as Cho, to buy firearms.
Cho, who killed 32 students and faculty members April 16 before turning a gun on himself, had been deemed mentally ill and a danger to himself in December 2005, but that information was not available in the computer systems used by the outlets that sold him guns.
The report released Wednesday was commissioned by Bush, who ordered Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to meet with school officials, mental-health experts and local leaders in 12 states to figure out how to better address some of the issues raised by the Virginia Tech case.
The report found that teachers and school administrators fear they may be breaking the law if they share student information. In many cases, the report said, officials have more power to share information than they realize.
“One of the most important things we found is that many of the obstacles are perceived,” Leavitt said. “People don’t understand what they can share and what they can’t share and that we need to do a much better job educating educators, the mental-health community and law enforcement that they can, in fact, share information when a person’s safety or a community’s safety is, in fact, potentially endangered.”
In a statement, Bush said that record-sharing among officials in health care, law enforcement and other areas “must improve.”
One of the nation’s leading advocacy groups for the mentally ill said the report doesn’t reveal anything that wasn’t already known.
“We don’t need any more commissions or task forces. We know what to do,” said Michael Fitzpatrick, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, based in Arlington, Va. “… (The report) talks about encouraging people to get help when they need it – when the real problem is that help often is not available.”
