Connecting the Dots: Threat Assessment, Depression and the Troubled Student

Abstract

One of the numerous responses to the mass shooting at Virginia Tech in April 2007 has been the call for higher education institutions in the United States to take an increased role in identifying troubled students. This has had widely felt effects, with educational institutions across the United States developing mechanisms such as Threat Assessment Teams to respond to the perceived heightened threat of campus violence. At the core of these responses is the notion of the troubled student that brings dangerousness and depression together. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to this, arguing that extreme violence has been extended from the provenance of the dangerous mad individual to a potential characteristic of the depressed individual. Interrogating this shift takes on special significance because understanding depression and violence is deemed vital to “connect the dots” to detect the troubled student, thereby preventing campus violence in higher education institutions. To consider this shifting conceptualization, this article draws closely on Hannah Arendt’s distinction between factual and rational truths and Michel Foucault’s analysis of melancholy. The Arendtian distinction between factual and rational truths facilitates analysis of the truths of the troubled student, as well as underscoring the importance that this recognition has for debate. Foucault’s investigation of melancholy together with his emphasis on the “structure of perception” is employed to tease out how truths of the troubled student are produced, and thereby demonstrate that they are rational truths. Drawing on these ideas, the article offers a critical examination of how depression figures as potency and advances the argument that in the take‐up of these emerging conceptualizations, there is a significant shift in how the troubled student is understood in higher education.

Notes

Notes

1 My focus is on responses within the higher education sector. Until the Virginia Tech mass shootings and the more recent shootings at Northern Illinois University, this sector had not been faced with security threats of this nature. The mass shootings at Virginia Tech has been referred to as “Higher Education’s 9/11” (Rinehart, 2007).

2 The artistic media, a woodcut engraving, could be said to reinforce the depiction of immobility. My thanks to the reviewer who commented on this effect.

3 In the Oxford Dictionary“frowardness” is stated as having origins in Old English, meaning “leading away from” (Soanes & Stevenson, 2010).

4 In the DSM, Specifiers are used to provide further detail for a diagnostic category, especially to designate subtypes of disorders.

5 I wish to thank one of the reviewers for drawing my attention to this aspect of depression in the DSM.

6 The relationship between mental illness and violence is contentious. For analysis of the relationship, see Friedman (2006); for critical analysis of discrimination and depression in U.S. college settings, see Wolnick (2007).

7 The Mass Shootings at Virginia Tech (Virginia Tech Review Panel, 2007) provides a list of 42 fatal shootings in the United States, dating from 1966 to 2007. The majority of these events occurred at schools. The Columbine massacre occurred on April 20, 1999: “Students Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 23 others at Columbine High School. They had plotted for a year to kill at least 500 and blow up their school. At the end of their hour‐long rampage, they turned the guns on themselves” (Virginia Tech Review Panel, 2007, Appendix L‐7).

8 Questions of how depression is defined, and the ways in which it has become essentialized, with certain human experiences becoming disordered are discussed in recent works such as The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder (Horwitz & Wakefield, 2007). A shift toward depression and dangerousness raises newfound concerns about these issues.

9 Reprinted from The Journal of Pediatrics, 155(6), Ferguson, C. J., San Miguel, C., & Hartley, R. D. “A Multivariate Analysis of Youth Violence and Aggression: The Influence of Family, Peers, Depression, and Media Violence,” pp. 904–908, Copyright 2009, with permission from Elsevier.

10 Other names for Threat Assessment Team include BART (Behavioral Assessment and Recommendation Team), Columbus State University; and BAIT (Behavior Assessment and Intervention Team), University of Dallas at Texas.

11 Sanon is “a spokeswoman for the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA), which represents university administrators in charge of student affairs” (“Watching the Disaffected,” 2008).

12 See Chapman (2009) for legal analysis of FERPA provisions. As mentioned earlier, this has given rise to debate over student privacy, raising the question of private versus public interest (Dunkle et al., 2008).