College student taken to psych ward over short story

All the people who insist that nobody in America is being involuntarily detained at a psychiatric ward over mere writings can pull their lower lip over their faces now.

At the University of Virginia's College at Wise, a 23-year-old student had to write a short story for creative writing class. He produced a story titled "Shitty First Drafts", which is about a person teetering on the brink of a violent breakdown. The story touches on controversial topics like suicide.

It's fiction, of course. The main point of this story was to address the problem of school shootings. It didn't condone violence in any way, and there was no murder in the story. But campus graybeards can't tell the difference between fiction and reality. And when they saw the story, the wrath of the Far Right came down forcefully.

Instructor Christopher Scalia later grumbled to the Wall Street Journal, "It had to be acted on immediately." Scalia told school administraitors (sic) about the story, who promptly searched the student's dorm room and his car. The search of the car was illegal, but it turned up 3 guns. The guns however were not illegal: The student was 23 (which is old enough to legally own guns), he had a concealed weapon permit, and the guns didn't leave his car. He'd had no serious trouble with the law and was authorized to possess all 3 guns. State law even says public colleges (which UVA-Wise supposedly is) can't go after someone for having a licensed gun.

Guess what happened then? The school promptly took him to a psych ward. Officially, it was an involuntary detainment rather than an involuntary commitment, but the point remains that he was held for no defensible reason.

For what?????

I guess Virginia is like Kentucky, where it seems like all you need to do to have someone taken to a mental "hospital" is say that they hurt your feewings or said "poop" 5 years ago.

Psychiatrists at the facility said the student posed no threat to himself or anyone else, so they released him. But UVA-Wise then expelled him. The excuse for the expulsion was that he had guns in his car - even though he had a permit. (Keep in mind that Virginia law says the school must allow licensed guns.)

As for the professor Christopher Scalia, I'm trying to figure out where I'd heard the name Scalia before. Let me think. Oh yeah, I remember now! Scalia's father is none other than right-wing Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

This isn't the first time something remotely like this has happened. A few months back, Valdosta State University, a public school in Georgia, expelled a student because he dared to oppose 2 new parking garages for environmental reasons. VSU refused to readmit him unless he consulted a psychiatrist. But the incident at UVA-Wise is the first one I can think of offhand in which an American institution of higher book-burnin' actually had someone taken to a mental institution over writings.

UVA-Wise's suppression of ideas and blatant abuse of the mental health process is bad enough. UVA-Wise's actions seem even more outrageous when you consider that the student who was victimized by the school is a Navy veteran of the Iraq War. The Navy trusted him to carry an automatic machine gun to guard a warship, but UVA-Wise won't even trust him to write fictional stories? This is a guy with a 3.9 GPA, so I doubt he had created much trouble at school.

Not only that, but he's a self-described conservative! The school's obviously not liberal; if it was, it wouldn't have abused the mental health system on the basis of a short story that was written as an assignment. I'd say the school is ultraconservative.

He wants to come back to UVA-Wise, but says he wouldn't write such a story now. He told the Wall Street Journal, "I want to be at Wise, so I would write about butterflies and rainbows." He said that because he was expelled, he'd have to reenlist in the Navy to pay off his student loans.

Has the criminalization of thought gotten so out of control that college students get taken to psych wards over assignments that in previous years would have never even raised any negative response? If things in 1994 were like they are now, I would've almost surely been committed just for some of the articles I put in The Last Word at the time. It would've been almost a certainty.

The thought policing that occurs now is strictly the stuff of totalitarian regimes. By very definition, in no truly free country can something like this ever happen. These days, you have to watch what you say and write if you don't want to be locked up.

(Source: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB121124048245705393-C6h0S850XJ7I9GwIiHnkNxBWxls_20080619.html;
http://www.timesnews.net/article.php?id=9005496)