Some points culled from a quick conversation I just had with Dr. Fuller Torrey, an expert in mental illness and its treatment. “No doubt” that Cho had paranoid schizophrenia. Was “clearly deteriorating” when stopped going to class and bought the guns. Whether that was just the course of the illness or because he stopped taking meds, we don’t know. A “classic” rampage killing. An extensive survey in the New York Times a few years back of such killing found that about half of them were committed by mentally ill people, that’s much higher than the roughly 5% of all other murders that are committed by the mentally ill. It’s his sense that these kind of killing have clearly been on the rise the last 20 years, which would make sense because during that period of time we’ve “increased the number of severely mentally ill discharged and not provided treatment.” If Kendra’s law–the New York law that makes involuntary commitment easier–had been in effect in Virginia would he have been committable? Unclear. But we do know that the Virginia law is “extremely stringent” (the standard is imminent danger). There had already been an official review going on whether the law was too strict. The case has “profound implications” for the work of the Treatment Advocacy Center that is trying to change the laws to make it easier to treat severely mentally ill individuals who don’t know that they need treatment or don’t want it.