Sad news

[lalouve]

At a Finnish school, an 18-year-old who is/was a pupil killed eight people, then shot himself. Others were injured, by the shooter or by climbing across broken glass in attempting to get out of school. The story is here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7082795.stm. The shooter is being treated for his injuries but is not expected to survive.

The

Comments

[intertext]

That's awful. These incidents seem to be getting more and more common, or perhaps just more violent. We always feel that we should have noticed something or done something - but... we're just human, and sometimes it's impossible to tell what's going on in the head of even someone we know well.
I know there's really nothing I can say that is comforting, but I can't help trying.

[lalouve]

I suspect that these are the quiet ones - the ones that act out in minor ways first get found before they do soemthing like this. But I can't help feeling that what schools need are more people, so that someone has time to see these students.
It's depressing. Today's news was overall not cheerful, and I feel like I have a private world, where everything is joyful, and a public world which is rapidly going places in handbaskets.

[zylice]

I keep hearing stories regarding shooting in the North American news, but I'm pretty shock that it could happen in the rest of the world. Each time I hear about it, I'm deeply sadden and confuse about incidences such as these. I've always wondered how anyone can get to the point of randomly killing/injuring innocent people.

[lalouve]

It's unusual elsewhere - there was an incident in Germany, and one in Scotland, though there the shooter had no real connection witht he school, as I understand it.
The people who commit the shootings often seem, in addition to being, of course, crazy, to be the victims of pennalism. They blame the school and the other students for being unhappy, so the school is a natural target. But how toget fromt hat to killing - I really don't get it.

[forthwritten]

Sad times.

I don't remember whether I said about this, but one of my friends, a senior (residential) tutor at his largely postgraduate hall of residence was talking to another senior tutor from one of the undergraduate halls, and she said that one of the students had gone out with his friends a little after freshers week, politely excised himself early, then gone back to his room and stabbed himself. He ended up in intensive care but I don't know what happened after that.

I'd worry a lot about those going quietly a bit mad - it seems that people only notice something's wrong if your behaviour starts affecting others. Obviously it's harder to notice, but at the same time I wish that tutors/teachers were better at picking up these things and there were better ways of quietly offering support. I realise that it's not the case for everyone but I was treated with kid gloves as soon as I had the counsellor's note, whereas I would have preferred not having to get that note in the first place.

[lalouve]

I wish we were better at it, too. Some of it is overwork, some of it is lack of knowledge, some of it is not caring enough. It is also very tempting to take out your own frustration and annoyance on the students, and that tends to get ugly.

I had a few incidents at work (students attempting suicide, students who cut themselves); my reaction was to ask that we get a)training in how to handle this and information on where to turn to get the students help and b)debriefing where this has been traumatic to us. And exactly nothing happened.

[lalouve]

And that is a scary story about the student. How terrible for everyone, including the friends.

[forthwritten]

Sorry, that should have said "excused himself".

In my experience, there's little support for friends of the students too - when I was 16 I was carrying around antiseptic cream and dressings and tape to patch up my self-harming friends before registration, and I wish there had been some kind of training/information/support. Then again, there was little of that for the people with serious self-harming problems, let alone those trying to support them...

I can easily imagine it's much harder for tutors and lecturers - I mean, I barely had two hours in seminars (as opposed to lectures) per week, and it would have been easy for most things to pass under the radar.