Interesting article about how do you distinguish crazy from creative

The whole Virginia Tech story is a really sad one. I watched "48 Hours" last night and they were doing profiles on the victims and were interviewing their family members and friends. It was just really awful I found myself crying and I had to turn the channel, I couldn't watch.

Every morning I read the papers online and I came across this interesting article in today's NY Daily News. The VT shooter was apparently an English major who wrote a story so disturbing in one of his creative writing courses, that the professor referred him to the school's counseling center. The article basically talks about how it's sometimes hard to tell the difference between someone who is just writing negative thoughts to vent to make themselves feel better and make the anger dissipate or someone who is just angry and off center and may very well act on those negative thoughts. As I've said in previous posts I suffer from panic attacks and anxiety and a lot of the time writing about my day, my negative/positive thoughts, fears, goals, plans for the evening or even gibberish that comes into my head helps me, very rarely do I act on negative thoughts, last week was a very rare case for me to act on a negative thought brought on by a panic attack (again as I've said it's about beating myself up cause I think I deserve it, fellings that I'm working on), if I'm too that point I can call a friend or speak to my therapist or write about that feeling. The big thing for me is writing it always makes me feel better, it makes the bad feelings go away! And it's a career goal of mine! The article points out how eirrie this past weeks episode of "The Sopranos" was in light of the VT shooting.

From today's NY Daily News

Creative vs. crazy
Grim material doesn't always tell the whole story
BY DAVID HINCKLEY
Wednesday, April 18th 2007, 4:00 AM

Dr. Barry Goldsmith, who teaches a comedy course at NYU, remembers a student handing in a sketch "that was all about ... depravity, and ended up with someone's head being used as a bowling ball."
That would have been fine, Goldsmith adds, "except it didn't come around to a funny ending. So it wasn't even black humor. It was just disturbing."
The periodic and disturbing question of whether dark writing foreshadows the next Unabomber or the next Stephen King arose again yesterday when it was revealed that Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui had written papers so unhinged that one of his teachers referred him to counseling.
The problem there, says psychologist Dr. Joy Browne, who hosts a nationally syndicated radio program from WOR (710 AM), is that even in cases that in retrospect seem dire, it is almost impossible to predict behavior from writings or words.
"There's been research on that," says Browne. "And even the research is split. For some people, putting aggression down on paper, or talking about it, dissipates the anger. For other people, it seems to make it more intense.
"There's almost no way to tell which is which."
Browne does say context can provide some hints.
"If someone came to me with a manifesto on killing their therapist, I'd be concerned," she says. "I'd be more concerned if there were also other symptoms, like disconnected thoughts or lack of eye contact."
It's all part of "specific ideation," which Browne explains is a means of gauging, among other things, the likelihood a patient will follow through on something he or she has said.
"If someone just announces they'd like to kill themselves," she says, "they're less likely to follow through than if they say, ‘I'm going to kill myself Tuesday night using Drano.'"
But many mass killers have left writings that, in retrospect, seem chillingly ominous.
Two months before the Columbine shootings in 1999, co-killer Dylan Klebold wrote a short story for school about a man who killed nine high school students.
"I saw emanating from him power, complacence, closure and godliness," wrote Klebold. "I understood his actions."
His teacher wrote on the paper, "You are an excellent writer and storyteller, but I have some problems with this one."
The subject of where creative writing pokes its nose into real life came up Sunday on "The Sopranos" when Tony Soprano accused his nephew Christopher of creating a scene so close to real life it embarrassed him.
Robert Viscusi, an English professor at Brooklyn College, says "The Sopranos" happens to be a good measure of what's so disturbing about Virginia Tech.
"On the show, everything happens for a reason," he says. "They're logic engines. These killings make no sense. We have no idea why he killed so many."
Viscusi says he has had students turn in papers that were off-center. "But in general, writing is the place where you can be crazy," he says. "Hamlet is crazy. He's a murderer. But you'd never make that accusation against the guy who wrote Hamlet."
Looking back, he says, "The Columbine kids printed an invitation to what they were going to do, and we didn't read it.
"But I don't know how you separate that from something less serious."