on james holmes in graduate school

Music: Erykah Badu: Bag Lady (2000)

Today a Colorado judge put a halt to a FOIA request by the AP for the emails of James Holmes, the suspect who killed twelve and injured another 58 in an Aurora, Colorado movie theatre last Friday. A federal law prohibits the release of grade- and performance-related information in any case, but not email correspondence. The judge presumably stopped the request because it would interfere with an ongoing investigation, which is the legal exception.

The request indexes two issues for me. First, it represents the symbiotic relationship between secrecy and publicity Jodi Dean has detailed brilliantly in her 2002 study, Publicity's Secret: contemporary modes of publicity function in regard to a logic of revelation based on a perceived public's "right to know." So powerful is the mediated desire to unearth the previously unknown or forbidden, Dean suggests, that truth or verifiable facts have given way to the latest nugget of now, even if it only has the whiff of possible truth (this is related, by and by, to the desire to publish one's innermost secrets on social networking sites; as Eldrich once sang, "I don't exist if you don't see me"). I would extend that to a rhetorical observation about media framing: whatever glint of "fact" or "detail" that dribbles out about Holmes' private or personal life is whipped up until it has stiff peaks in a preformatted fantasy or cultural narrative---in this case, variations of the "youth in crisis" fantasy. One variation is "death by texting," you know. Here is another: genius gone unreckoned. And more deeply, that genius is related to madness. And by extension, genius excuses bad/immoral behavior.

For example, the first frame for reporting was the "young genius" whose unrecognized brilliance put him over the edge. A couple of days ago this narrative began to fall apart with the reports of fellow students and teachers that he was not all that (it's probably a little of column A and column B: smart, but not emotionally or socially so). So it remains to be seen what details will be crammed into the next ready-made frame, so that there is something to report, as "news."

Incidentally, I just saw "Dr. Drew" doing a special on schizophrenic children as a way to address Aurora. I'm glad to see mental illness getting attention, but (a) there's no evidence Holmes was schizophrenic; and (b) I'm ambivalent about swinging the pendulum from moral responsibility to biological pathology. You and I both know it's probably somewhere in the middle---as psychosis often is, a "both/and" . . . perhaps the mental health angle is so troublesome to journalists because it is not like Western biological medicine, collapsing into a neat binary? (insert rant here about the stigma against Eastern medicine.)

Regardless, and aside from the obvious desire we all have to have "answers" to the existential questions, this particular case is especially noteworthy because there is not a lot of information to go on. It's intriguing, and often disgusting, to see how our contemporary publicity machine spins out content, or fantasy, in the guise of news. I ask you, reading friend, to keep track of the different ways this story gets framed over the weeks this case continues to unfold. I suppose the only surprising element is that someone has not suggested he was a practicing Satanist or "goth" or what have you.

Closely related to my issue with media framing is the rather odd avoidance of discussing the mythos of the Dark Knight, a decidedly perverse shift in the Batman comic that portrays the hero as mentally unstable---the meta-move being that there is little difference between Batman and his villains except means (money). Holmes reportedly told police he was "the Joker," a telling betrayal of reality-as-fantasy . . . .

The second issue, however, does hit rather close to home. The AP request for academic emails from this student does beg a question that bears on what I (and most of you reading) do for a living: were there warning signs, and if so, why didn't someone say something? In other words, higher education is implicated at the center of this massacre. We say undergraduate education is in loco parentis, but graduate school is a bit murkier in terms of its paternal function, since the mentoring relationship is supposed to metamorphose to an advising one, the intimacy assumed a bit removed (e.g., because graduate students are more "adult"). Anyone who works in education knows, this popular fantasy is the inverse of what happens at the research university: with ugrads we are more hands-off, but with grads we tend to be more mentorish---more, uh, parental. I know that's a can of worms, so Imma gonna drop it like a potato on the Sterno. Still, there are questions: Were Holmes' graduate professors responsible for assessing his mental health? Should they have noticed signs? After all, the news has been reported that he mailed a notebook detailing his massacre plans to a professor of psychiatry (whether he knew Holmes is not yet known).

Now, there's not much more to say regarding Holmes specifically. There is not enough information, as badly as the MSM would like it (as badly as we would like it, as I would like it). I do actually have faith that very smart and well-intentioned people in Colorado are on the case and we will have more considered and accurate information once the legal system works itself through. What we can discuss is the issue of mental health in higher education: what do we, as educators, do about students we perceive are mentally unstable, or whom we think needs help? How do we recognize "warning signs," if that is possible? And then, who has the power to recognize warning signs, and what is appropriate, and to whom does one say something to if she has concerns? I've been a professor at public institutions for ten years now, and I tell ya: I don't know the answers to these kinds of questions.

As a professor, I have personally engaged three students whom I believed posed a physical risk to my person. I reported these individuals to my immediate supervisors and in two cases to the police. In each case, legal issues took precedent over mental health. In one case the person was legitimately a danger to him/herself and others, and even then mental health issues took a back seat to legal and then moral issues. The person had to be cited for a "violation of the student code of conduct"---that is, s/he had to be punished---before any mental health services could be rendered (and even then, it was only an "option" and not compulsory for him/her to stay in school). Before this incident, in the wake of a previous (my third) with an unstable student, I contacted behavioral services and asked if there were workshops or training sessions to help faculty recognize and manage mental health issues with students. Nope. My query, in fact, was regarded as strange (perhaps I was identified as an unstable person for inquiring? I certainly felt that way on the phone).

I realize there is a morass of legal issues involved here, and offering to help this or that student can implicate a school in legal problems. There is also the rather strict rules about medical health information disclosure that closely guard a student's mental health records for all sorts of legitimate reasons (e.g., discrimination).

Even so, I do think we gotta get over this ideological stigma of having issues with one's mental health as somehow a moral shortcoming or failing. (Heck, just living in Seattle in February can get ya down!) The widespread hatred of psychiatry and psychoanalysis among academics is a good example of such an ideology: if you are bipolar, or suffer from depression, on up to the less functional issues of schizophrenia or even personality disorders, somehow it is "your fault." Some volitional acts may be---there is certainly a moral culpability for what Holmes did, and there's no question he'll be asked to reckon with it (for not, for example, seeking help). But is there something preventative that could have been done? If so, I am pretty sure the reason it wasn't has to do with the systemic discouragement of doing something about a graduate student who exhibits problems.

Educators are encouraged, systemically, to pass the buck.

I have seen "unstable" graduates come and go. I've seen very disturbed graduate students "ignored" because getting involved meant possible legal trouble or entanglement (or more to the point: trying to do something means one will meet a metaphorical brick wall). I've also seen very abusive and mentally unstable professors go ignored or "contained" in some way too (another can o' worms).

Of course, educational institutions all have "student behavioral services" or some euphemistically named office to deal with concerns and problems, however, in my experience these offices are often an extension of legal services. Their well-trained and well-meaning counselors often have their hands tied.

We simply do not have the infrastructure to deal with mental health issues. Educators don't have the training. Those who have the training don't have the power to do something. And then, if something is done, there's always the question of eccentricity: most of us in this line of work are not "normal," because---and this is a common joke---who would chose to be a teacher in his or her right mind, given the increasingly politicized hardship of education as a profession? It's a problem. And frankly, I don't know what we, what I, can do about it. Holmes is admittedly an aberration---the odd (psychotic) break out. Even so, it's one odd break too many. What can we do? What do we do?