On April 16 2007 I awoke with a strange premonition that it was going to be another "World Trade Center" news day. I turned on the TV and there it was; snowflakes and police scrambling around Norris Hall on the Virginia Tech Campus. As I was prepping for a routine medical procedure the following day I said to myself: "Well, I guess I will miss this one." Little did I know...

A few days later I received a call from Firestorm the business continuity/disaster mitigation company that Virginia Tech had hired to help them manage the crisis. Apparently the Board of Directors of Virginia Tech were concerned for the very upper administrations (deans of the various colleges through to the university president's) mental health. They had requested that Hero(my therapy/disaster relief dog) and I be called in to fill that need.

Upon arriving we hit the ground running and for 8 days rarely slept doing everything from press communications to individual chats with all levels of the VT community. And a terrific community of people they were.

To make a long story short Firestorm and I got along well and I am now on their Council of Experts along with C. Everett Koop and other Surgeons General, 911 Commission members, former high level Secret Service members and a host of other impressive types. It is a prisoner and an honor to be associated with such high quality people. Please visit Firestorm.com for more about this most excellent company.

My Reflections on the Virginia Tech Experience

I had this conversation with two Surgeons General and several highly placed individuals in and out of VT. In the aftermath of the event people were scurrying to find who was responsible and what heads should roll and how to prevent such a thing from ever happening again. In my opinion these are the wrong roads to go down.

Virginia Tech essentially got hit by a comet. The comet was a student far outside the range of normal behavior parameters and very hard to predict. What he did was the equivalent of a comet smashing into the VT campus. There is no way to stop a comet and there is no way to prevent another one from hitting should any locale be so unlucky. If you look at the binomial distribution - better known as the bell shaped curve it is clear that anyone that would commit such a massacre comes from somewhere under the left lip of that bell shaped curve. And from my training I know that there always will be a left lip on that curve. There is no "cure" for the natural distribution of traits. There will always be those who act from that place. Please don't shoot the messenger but even while we were there, there were two other shootings - one at NASA and another I believe in Kansas where some teenager with an AK47 opened fire at a shopping center. We now have 24/7 in your face real time exposure to the horror of living in this age of trauma.

As for root causes of these events. Who knows? I remember when Charles Whitmore shot the students from the bell tower in Austin Texas. Apparently 6 months before it happened he went to doctors complaining he thought he had a brain tumor and might hurt people. Well an autopsy proved him correct - though the physicians claimed it was in an area of the brain that could not have caused his behavior. Having spent quite a great deal of time studying the brain and psychology I would say if he went for help with that fear and in fact had a tumor maybe our understanding of the interconnections of the brain is weak. Besides all the psychology of the VT shooter I had the distinct impression he might have suffered some subclinical brain trauma in his life. As he shot himself in the head we will never know.

As for societal cures; that is more difficult. Can we legislate that all kids have two parents, or at least one that shows them meaningful love? Can we outlaw video games that make killing people antiseptic, cool and sexy? I don't think so. And even if we could I still believe in that left lip of the bell shaped curve.

Contact Los Angles psychologist with further discussions or thought.