Tragedy at Virginia Tech

Abstract

While college campuses are relatively safe environments, the promise of safety and security on campus was shattered by a single gunman on April 16, 2007. Seung-Hui Cho, a senior at Virginia Tech, shot 49 students and faculty, killing 32, before killing himself. The authors are psychologists and directors of university counseling centers; they examine the many implications of this tragedy on mental health counseling. The assailant's significant psychological disturbances and previous contact with mental health professionals are critical to understanding how he was able to act out his murderous rage. The mental health response to a traumatized community of families, friends, colleagues, and peers is reviewed. Out of the tragedy, there have emerged many issues that challenge the role of counseling centers within the university including the development of threat assessment teams, the potential conflicts between client confidentiality and crisis prevention/management, and the on-going education for the university community regarding suicide prevention, mental illness and support for potentially marginalized students.hate blows a bubble of despair into hugeness world system universe and bang -fear buries a tomorrow under woe and up comes yesterday most green and young -e e cummings (1940) On April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho, a senior English major at Virginia Tech, shot 49 students and faculty, killing 32, before turning his gun on himself and committing suicide in front of wounded survivors. This horrific tragedy now enters history as the largest single act of violence at an American university. What was clearly an incomprehensible criminal act quickly became a mental health emergency that challenged counseling psychologists and other mental health practitioners to respond to the needs of families and friends of the deceased, to the wounded survivors, and to a traumatized community-this in addition to the struggle to understand the motivations of this deeply disturbed young man who so carefully planned the murders and his own death. As directors of university counseling centers, we will examine the

Editors’ Reflections on the Crown Jewel of the Society of Counseling Psychology: 1969–2019

“…If we wanted the articles in the Forum to be timely, we needed shorter articles, and we needed to have a different process for a manuscript to be reviewed and revised prior to publication. The inaugural article was "Tragedy at Virginia Tech: Trauma and Aftermath" (Flynn & Heitzmann, 2008). Six Practice Fora followed Flynn and Heitzmann's article.…”