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Loner or Psychopath?How a college might detect and help a student who's ready to explode.

By Emily BazelonPosted Thursday, April 19, 2007, at 3:41 PM ET

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Amanda Schaffer explains the legal tightrope colleges walk when dealing with mentally ill students. Michael Agger tracks the response on the Web the day after the Virginia Tech shootings. Torie Bosch explains how Cho killed 32 people with small guns.

What about the legal constraints that schools face in handling mentally ill students? In the last few years, a few schools have been sued for violating disability-rights laws by students they asked to withdraw or to leave the college dormitories. Those cases have spooked other schools about taking such steps, even to the point that they fear telling parents about students' troubles. According to Gary Pavela, the director of judicial programs at the University of Maryland at College Park, and the author of Questions and Answers on College Student Suicide, schools do take a legal risk when they put into place policies that mandate leave, rather than evaluating cases as they arise. It's also true that, for the most part, state laws governing involuntary commitment set a high threshold for sending a person to a mental hospital against his will.

But there are good reasons to be wary of lowering that bar—involuntary commitment can be wielded as a weapon as well as a tool. And the laws don't mean schools can't support case-by-case suspensions or withdrawals, like the Bryn Mawr incidents. As for notifying parents, Pavela said in a live chat last summer with the Chronicle of Higher Education that the trend is toward telling parents more rather than less, the side he errs on when students attempt, or gesture toward, suicide.

Before we start rewriting laws or spurring schools into 180-degree policy swivels, it's worth pointing out that as yet, there's no evidence that Cho refused treatment. He was recommended for counseling after his brief hospitalization. It is possible that he simply fell through the cracks. Good mental-health care is about persuasion as much as detention orders. We need campus mental-health centers that pay close attention and work with campus police to do the careful piecework that sorts the real threats from the sad sacks.

Cho's roommates said in television interviews this week that he stopped talking to them months ago, and that in the year they knew him, they "never saw him with anyone." But then they added that he wasn't the only loner. The other kids they were talking about haven't hurt anyone. Even this week, we need to remember them, too.