Yes, I want and need more data, but it is suggestive. this is very subjective, but i saw his face, the shot from his student id, i think, and it looked so much like the look i have on my face in public it made me shiver. i know the look because i see it on my myspce site-let my webcam take a few timed shots, then picked one. eyes alive, but do people really look? face more or less neutral, in a waiting posture. but to people who don't read those kind of cues...how can i read those and not theirs? who the hell knows? not just his face, i'm not that silly. it's the fact that he was described by his sister as gentle and loving and trying so hard to fit in. the fact that he never, from the very beginning of his life, fit in. the fact that he literally did not have one conversation with some of his suitemates.
So sure. it makes me wonder. because he had a conscience. he was just delusional...just? who knows what else went wrong? i myself have bipolar as well as being aspie. carry diagnosis of ocd as well, but i sort of consider it redundant. Mr. Cho, if he had ASD, started out with difficulty making social connections within a culture that had little tolerance for failure of any kind-and ours is the kind of difficulty in which applying pressure nearly assures further "failure". But it goes further. South Koreans tend to overidentify. They are actually afraid we will change our treaty status with them because of this, South Koreans all over the country are contemplating 32 day fasts (one day for each victim) and gathering together in groups to keep each other safe in case we attack. Seung-Hiu Cho, to them, is South Korea-and they think he must be to us-to the US.
So it is in South Korean families. The child is the family, and their family before them, and what will come after them. They represent so much that there is no room to fail or even be...a strain for anyone. Imagine what it would be like for an aspie. Imagine if it were perhaps not just pressure, but active scorn...
And there my little fantasy spins into "need more data" land, because i was a child with autism, and my parents were american but they were hideously unfit to be parents. i am slightly more likely to respond to violence with violence, and might even get in someone's face if they wouldn't leave me alone when i needed to be alone-i'm through crawling under things or the equivalent. but to go to that extreme-to PLAN to go to that extreme? it's the calculation...
yes. the calculation. yet this young man was no sociopath. and no, he was not schizophrenic, not definitively. we can't rule out asd. you know one thing that sticks out? he always wore sunglasses. i do that. or i do it a lot, and i always have them. to cut down the stimulation level, if i need to.
mass shooters, oddly enough, can be diagnosed as mentally ill but not suffering from a chronic mental illness. sometimes they are suffering from something known as brief reactive psychosis. brief can be hours, days or months-it's not years. it does usually occur in vulnerable individuals, when they are exposed to a powerful stressor. so Cho could be ASD, have been suffering a brief reactive psychosis...and lots of people died. and it was no more the result of the asd than it would have been the result of him having sustained a series of losses, coming from an abusive background, having been the victim of a crime, or any other number of things which made his cortisol levels higher than average. an aspie with better coping skills would not be as vulnerable, perhaps...don't know what the research is, but intuitively that feels right. so many factors, though...
I don't hear anyone asking the right questions. how was his sense of direction? i understand his parents used to drive him every day-was that because they didn't have another car, or could he not figure out how to drive? was his hearing overly acute? but they don't know the right questions, probably.
to whoever had the problem with the teachers wanting someone in the forum to be tested, and the reaction of their teacher mother: test the IQ. And it was high, so mum was smug. well, i had the exact, exact situation. no lie. teacher mother and everything. they wanted to test me for "emotional disturbances" was how they put it, so i could get special resources, but needed her permission-which is odd, i think. she said, test her IQ. well, i came out gifted. weird, but gifted. somehow, this vindicated her. this also kept her abused child from seeing a psychologist. people who care for children are not the enemy. my teacher was trying to help, and the benighted laws of the state i live in kept me from getting not only services-but it blocked off any avenues of accountability for my parents or escape for me or my brother. But they couldn't test me without her permission, at least not back then. Can you say liability, anyone?
21 Apr 2007, 8:16 pm
