Suicide and the Utah Underground

Two years since the Virginia Tech shootings, and we're still bringing it up. The latest? Recently released psychiatric records concerning the suicidal perpetrator. From the Wall Street Journal:

"Virginia Polytechnic Institute staff evaluated Seung-Hui Cho more than a year before he killed 32 people and himself in a 2007 rampage, but counselors concluded he was a depressed student with a history of 'erratic behavior' who showed no homicidal tendencies, according to newly released mental health records."


The spectacle of this incident will drag on for another few years, I suppose, while the depression, mental illness and suicides among us continue to rage unabated. From 2000 to 2005, suicide came in at number 9 as a leading cause of death here in Utah. That puts Utah at number 7 nationwide as a leader in suicides. This is consistent, of course, with Utah's undisputed place as the most depressed state in the Union: over ten percent of adolescents and adults here suffer from major depression.

For perspective, from 2000 to 2005, we had a total of 319 murders in the Beehive State. In the same period, over 2,000 Utahns killed themselves.

Oh, and it bears mentioning that Utah settled, a few years ago, once and for all, a dispute with the University of Utah over whether the University could ban the possession of firearms on campus. Guess which side won....

And guess where I'll be starting classes tomorrow? Arabic, Macroeconomics, and, at this point, and Medical Imaging Systems.