The University of Colorado needs to walk a careful line between protecting its students and needlessly stigmatizing the mentally ill in the wake of a shocking attack in a student cafeteria outside University Memorial Center.
Indeed, all of society needs to practice the same balancing act between prudence and persecution.
A cashier at the Alferd Packer Grill in the UMC, identified as Kenton Astin, 39, was arrested for using a steak knife Monday to slice the throat of a freshman student. Astin then stabbed himself repeatedly before police subdued him with a stun gun. The victim, Michael George Knorps, 17, is expected to recover. Astin was hospitalized in serious condition.
In the wake of the attack, the university announced it would undertake criminal background checks on all new employees, a prudent move. It also suspended, with pay, all employees who had been recommended by the Mental Health Center of Boulder County – the agency that referred Astin to CU – until they can be checked out.
With the benefit of hindsight, there is much in Astin’s background that could have warned the university that he could pose a threat to other people and to himself. Astin was arrested in Longmont in 2001 for a similar, unprovoked knife attack on a citizen. If a further red flag was needed, the fact that he used several aliases during that period – including that of Dylan Klebold, one of the two perpetrators of the mass killings at Columbine High School – would have served nicely.
Astin later was found not guilty of the Longmont stabbing by reason of insanity and sent to the state mental hospital in Pueblo, which released him two years ago to the supervision of the mental health center. CU officials said he had a good work record prior to the attack but would not have been hired if the university had known about the previous attack.
Which, of course, raises a very good question: Why wasn’t the university told about that incident and other pertinent parts of Astin’s record?
Unfortunately, not all good questions have good answers – let alone easy ones. Mental health experts must continually balance issues of patient privacy and public safety. It’s clear, after the fact, that this time they leaned too far toward protecting Astin. But it is equally clear that unless the mentally ill are to be locked away for life, there must be some way of treating them and eventually re-integrating them into society. One of the most important steps is getting recovered patients back to gainful employment.
At this point, the issue of patient privacy stops being merely an ethical issue and assumes a pragmatic dimension. If knowledge of past offenses is too widely disseminated, it may preclude the patient from getting a job. If such knowledge leaks into the general community, it can be damaging.
Clearly, past violent acts should be disclosed to potential employers, along with current diagnoses and treatments. But employers, in turn, must treat such information with the utmost respect and use it to channel the formerly mentally ill into jobs suited to their current behavior, not refusing to hire them at all.
