Psychiatrist and patients rights advocate Deborah Peel says the Aug. 30 report on the Virginia Tech shooting turns a blind eye to the root cause of the tragedy.
"Frankly, this panel's report is an absolute whitewash," Peel said. "It's not about a failure of information, but a failure of responsibility."
According to Peel, the founder of the watchdog group Patient Privacy Rights, the real culprit is the lack of funding for mental health in the United States.
On Thursday, the Commonwealth of Virginia released its official review into the April shooting at Virginia Tech. Seung-hui Cho, a student at the university, gunned down 32 other students and teachers before killing himself in the worst campus massacre in U.S. history.
The panel concluded that while university officials should have done more to alert students after the first two victims were killed, once Cho set off to kill as many people as possible, there was little that could have stopped him. However, the report also said that healthcare workers, law enforcement and educational authorities should have "connected the dots" and recognized the risk that Cho - who was mentally ill - presented to others.
This was a view that Virginia Gov. Timothy Kaine supported. In an interview on National Public Radio, Kaine said, "It was clearly an error. No one I guess felt they were primarily responsible to act. The issue was compounded by the fact that the extensive history about Cho that existed in his public school records - none of that went to the university when he went there as a freshman."
Peel agrees with Kaine that many individuals familiar with Cho failed to act decisively. But she says lack of money, not lack of information, prevented Cho from receiving the help he needed.
"School authorities had plenty of information," she said. "The psychologsist who had seen this kid had plenty of information. The judge who made the ridiculous decision to commit him to outpatient treatment - he should have committed him to at least 30 days of inpatient treatment - had plenty of information. The police didn't act - and the guy was stalking fellow students."
What was lacking, Peel says, is mental health funding.
Peel says when she began practicing in the 1970s, she didn't realize the country's support for mental health was at its apex. "Then, eight to ten percent of every dollar spent on healthcare went to mental health," she says. "Today, it's only one to two percent. Intensive, long-term care is gone."
"The thing that makes me so furious is that we know what the best treatment for people like Cho is - long-term, intensive hospitalization," Peel said.