What effect did this scene from his high school days have on Cho's mind?

[BurtWorm]

From all I've read or seen about him, it seems that Cho had some sort of organic brain syndrome that affected him his whole life. I know of instances of a child with anti-social tendencies coming out of families that are otherwise perfectly functional. Who knows what causes the one misfit--a head injury? A genetic mutation? Environmental factors in the pregnancy? Who knows? But it seems clear that Cho was already "off" by the time the scene below occurred.

I was pretty shy myself in a lot of my school days--not a loner, but a kid who often dreaded being in the spotlight. I can empathize with the Cho in the story below, which, I'm guessing, is a lot more than Cho was capable of toward anyone else. But I can recall scenes in school when I really did not want to participate and would have received no sympathy from teacher or classmates. You don't easily forget such primal scenes of public humiliation.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18169776/


Chris Davids, a Virginia Tech student who graduated with Cho from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va., in 2003, recalled that Cho almost never opened his mouth and would ignore attempts to strike up a conversation.

Once, in an English class, the teacher had the students read aloud and, when it was Cho’s turn, he just looked down in silence, Davids recalled in an interview with The Associated Press. Finally, after the teacher threatened to give him a failing grade for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded “like he had something in his mouth,” Davids said.

“As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, ‘Go back to China,’” Davids said.

[goddess40]

1. Stress - overtime - can rewire the brain

and some studies seem to show that it's the part of the brain that controls the ability to show rage.
(I saw a women on the news this morning that talked about this but I didn't catch her name.)

edit:
http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/003815.html
A new study summarized on Schizophrenia Research Forum (a web site for schizophrenia researchers) suggests that neuroscientists may be starting to understand how stress contributes to the development of schizophrenia. Researchers have identified how stress specifically changes the brain, resulting in loss of dendrite cells in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, and causing dendrite cell growth in another part of the brain. These changes were accompanied by distinctly different effects on facets of executive function (the part of the brain responsible for decision making) served by these two areas.

[hippiechick]

2. dupe thread: earlier discussion ~

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x703140


:hi:

[indepat]

3. Public humiliation is something a person likely carries the rest of a lifetime: luckily

only a few ultimately act out their anguish in violence.

[potisok]

4. If you tease a dog enough it will bite you !

Since this happened I have wondered how many times he had to endure racial slurs or public humiliation. It goes on in our children's lives far to much. I am not justifying his actions, just expressing a thought.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

5. Probably not very much.

Many people get bullied in school.

Very few become mentally ill. Far fewer become violent.

I think this is basically trying to find blame for an event where there isn't any place to lay blame, except, perhaps, on imbalanced brain chemicals.

[BurtWorm]

6. You don't seem to think anything influenced Cho's behavior.

:shrug:

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

7. Read again.

An imbalance of brain chemicals influenced his behaviour.

You can blame bullies, or violent movies, or guns, or lack of cuns, or demon possession, or whatever pet issue you have all you want; but if you're serious about helping people and potentially prevent such things in the future you'll have to address the issue of mental health.

[BurtWorm]

8. No shit?

:popcorn:

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

10. No shit.

[BurtWorm]

18. If you read my OP you'll see that I said pretty much what you said.

His brain seems to have been dangerously damaged for most of his life. You can't pinpoint what caused this damage based on what is commonly known about him. Isn't that what you said?

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

21. I'm saying bullying didn't damage his brain.

Any more than it damaged any of us.

[BurtWorm]

23. And how is that relevant to this thread?

I don't follow you.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

24. You asked in your OP.

[BurtWorm]

27. I asked what effect.

I never said a word about blame. You brought blame up. You bring it up in every thread on this subject I've encountered you in. Is it possible to discuss the biography of Cho Seung-hui without pretending to know what in it is or isn't to blame for the mass murder? Does every discussion of Cho's background and who he was have to devolve into a pointless exercise over what is definitively to blame for the murder of 31 people on Monday? Are we not subtle enough to understand that a LOT of factors contributed to the murders?

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

28. Oh, you're only asking what effect it had?

Here I thought you were asking in the context of a guy who just killed 32 people last monday. I suppose that's just a coincidence.

What effect did it have? Well, it probably hurt his feelings.

[BurtWorm]

29. That's it! I'm reaching for my revolver!

;)

Now it's getting hard to read where you're coming from on this and why you've been expending so much energy on it. On the one hand, you seem to want to keep the subject focused on *blame,* the very idea of which you seem to want to challenge. But when the subject goes to something more subtle than blame, like the influence of his biography or the art he viewed--questions that go to who this guy really was--you want to dismiss it as irrelevant. Is this because you're not interested in who this guy really was? Then why are you participating in threads about his biography? It's a little puzzling.

[MousePlayingDaffodil]

I agree.

Moreover, beyond this one incident that's come to light, it would appear that there were not a few people in Cho's life who tried to engage him on friendly. For whatever reason (probably his mental state), he apparently chose to remain aloof.

[MousePlayingDaffodil]

11. I agree.

Moreover, beyond this one incident that's come to light, it would appear that there were not a few people in Cho's life who tried to engage him on friendly. For whatever reason (probably his mental state), he apparently chose to remain aloof.

[MousePlayingDaffodil]

12. I agree.

Moreover, beyond this one incident that's come to light, it would appear that there were not a few people in Cho's life who tried to engage him on friendly. For whatever reason (probably his mental state), he apparently chose to remain aloof.

[dsc]

9. If humiliation in school caused people to become murderers

I would be the next Ted Bundy. Clearly humiliating kids isn't a good thing and that teacher should have sent some people to the office for laughing but this guy clearly had some serious problems all by himself.

[BurtWorm]

14. Without a doubt. I said just that in the OP.

I'm interested in the question of what our social responsibility is in situations like this. For example, I wonder what the *teacher* (the adult in the room) did when Cho became the target of these taunts.


And I wonder why someone this unsocialized in public high school would go on to pay thousands of dollars to be this unsocialized in university.

:wtf:

[dsc]

20. Your second question is easily answered

For most of us who were bullied in high school college promises to be better. For me it was. As awful as my early high school was my college was great. I can easily see how someone who had a bad high school experience thinks that college would be better. It is sad that didn't happen for him.

[BurtWorm]

25. I'm not at all surprised that it held out no promise for this kid.

He sounds barely functional in social settings. Someone that outside is always going to have a hard time getting inside. Probably doesn't even want to get inside. And a lot of people who are like that can actually become perfectly fulfilled outside. This kid, on the other hand, sounds like he wouldn't have been able to function well anywhere.

[dsc]

26. I went to college 2 states and hundreds of miles away from home

pretty much to get away from my hometown. I was outside but I guess still wanted inside badly enough to find my way in.

[Kelly Rupert]

13. It's sad, yeah, but it isn't the whole story.

Being taunted in school is commonplace. Mass murder is not.

[BurtWorm]

19. Of course it isn't the whole story.

It could however be emlematic of the whole story. A scene like this is not going to cure a paranoid of paranoia.

[KurtNYC]

15. Or maybe it was because he didn't have a unicorn

Afterall, have you ever heard of a kid with a unicorn going on a killing spree?

(sorry for the sarcasm) but I disagree strongly with the idea that being laughed at causes (or in any way justifies) what this guy did. Assuming there are millions of acts of kids picking on, laughing at or outright bullying each other every day, then bullying produces a killer 1 out of every 5 billions times. Not a strong cause and effect relationship.

EVERYONE got picked on in school. Everyone.

[BurtWorm]

22. Justification of what this kid did is way beside the point.

Who are you disagreeing with? Is anyone saying mass murder is justified?

My original post was not about cause and effect, in any case. I stated pretty clearly that the kid was almost certainly off before the scene described happened. But if I were to make a film about the massacre, I would probably include this scene as **somehow** relevant--**perhaps.** It's interesting to hear described an early instance of Cho's being odd man out in a school setting. I am willing to bet that this was not the first time some scene like this was played out in his life.

[KurtNYC]

30. The title of your OP asks "what effect..."

how is that not about cause and effect??

In a movie, they would show every kid in that classroom doing exactly what MSNBC describes "pointing, laughing and saying "go back to china" but things don't happen that way in real life. One person, maybe, said "go back to china" but all of them?! More likely, this kid made people uncomfortable. Sometimes laughter comes from being extremely nervous. People get gut feelings about each other and many have said, including Cho's great Aunt, that there was something disturbing about him.

[BurtWorm]

31. Very few people would not be uncomfortable around a kid like this one.

It's odd that, although people do get gut feelings about each other, that's not enough to have forced some action along the way to get him helped. Of course "help" is a pretty broad concept, and just as the factors that went into whatever made him kill are multifarious, so too would be the sorts of help required to ensure that a kid like this wouldn't slip so through the cracks that he'd be able to arm himself to the teeth, commit two murders, mail a package to NBC, then resume his killing spree. Shit like this just happens and will always happen. Thirty-two is a threshold now just waiting to be reached again.

[WI_DEM]

16. Some teachers shouldn't be in a classroom. That teacher allowed that to happen

openly, rather than taking him aside at the end of the class to find out what the problem was and trying to deal with it.

[Breeze54]

17. His grandmother said he was off kilter all his life

and was a 'problem child' (my words) all his life.
He was anti-social in SK and everyone there knew it.
She said something like 'he hasn't been right all his life.'