Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion National Dialogue Hurting Or Helping?

Re. JonLaw's reaction this floated around here a while back: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/magazine/can-you-call-a-9-year-old-a-psychopath.html

The truly heart wrenching part of the article for me was the father, the fact that he was the same as a child, and the hope that somehow their kid would also snap out of it eventually.

Although it seems to relate more to the "I am Adam Lanza's mother" article than to anything that has been reported about Lanza himself.

I wouldn't say "jumping to conclusions." We don't have much information to confirm or deny, but it's a reasonable hypothesis.

You can't just draw an arbitrary line between suicide and mass murder, because obviously suicide was a big component of what happened here. That's usually the case with this kind of incident... the shooter kills a bunch of people, then kills himself. That's the plan.

I sincerely hope that the media stops heading toward the ASD connection - as there really is no connection. What I wonder, however, if AL had been heading into schizophrenia or even schizoaffective disorder (bipolar moods in combination with disorder of thoughts). He is at the typical age of onset....and early schizophrenia could be easily misdisgnosed as his ASD symptoms worsening: social withdrawal, lack of connection with others, lack of adherence to social standards. Though most people with thought-disorders do not become violent, there is a subset who do. One of my first jobs as a ciunselor was seeing adults trim a state mental hospital. Two of them had shot and killed their parents as young adults.

The lack of insurance coverage for mental health treatment is apalling. A child at risk is a great deal more likely to die from untreated mental illness than tetanus or dyptheria or enlarged tonsils (random covered treatments that popped into my mind).

Sigh.

I saw a counselor on tv this morning making that same plea, "insurance doesn't cover it"..... except... this was a very rich young man. Although it's a misinformed, twisted streatch to attribute his violence to his autism, still, if they were that far along in seeking treatment then he was getting treatment. I think there was something wrong: they tried something.

If there's one thing I'm certain of it's that "access to mental health treatment" was not an issue with this particular family.

I do think everyone seems worried that this will refelect badly on their own demographic. The homeschoolers saw that he was homeschooled shortly in highschool and they said, "great! now the world's going to look down on homeschoolers." When I told the hubby the father divorced and remarried he said, "so it's the parents fault". ?! etc

That insecurity everyone's feeling might just turn into a witch hunt and then a mob cry for more regulations on "those guys", whoever seems logical (beyond just outlawing mass murder). Whatever parts added up to this do not create that reaction in most people.

Monetarily maybe. But the mental health system is difficult to navigate ...one needs to be extraordinarily determined to find what one might need. Additionally having a mentally ill 20 year old child can be like watching a head-on collision with no ability to stop it. Not that this was the case here, we don't know, but many parents i see want help for their young adult child but have no legal grounds to force treatment until things are very severe.

There is no simple answer IMO. We grasp at causes as a way to feel in control of something so horrific. My heart breaks for those families. We lost a son 3 years ago this January...and it is unimaginable the pain. I cannot even think to have lost a child through such violence.

Uh, she provided him training in the use of small arms.

Nobody said this.

JonLaw said it's "often" possible to tell who is "kind of prone" to doing crazy things. I wrote that I agreed about being able to spot people who need to be monitored or helped.

If people had been paying attention to the Columbine kids, their plans would have been obvious. Everything was detailed (well in advance) on paper, on video, and on a website. Multiple people failed in ordinary ways, and the result was disastrous.

IMO, there are systemic and social barriers that allow kids like the Columbine pair to slip through the cracks. This is why it's important to analyze everything leading up to these events and look for patterns, both in the perpetrators themselves and the responses to them in the years/months leading up to attacks. Did the shooters stockpile weapons? Did they create extremist writings? Were there diagnoses of mental illness or allegations thereof? Did people make credible complaints about the shooters? Did the cops take the complaints seriously (in the case the Columbine, the answers to the last two questions are yes and no.)? Etc. When we try to look for individual causes (they were goths, they were bullied, there were guns in the house, it was a reaction to meds, no one knew, etc.), we set ourselves up for another round of shootings.

These problems are complex, which is why it's important to find a way to identify not only the signs that might help identify someone who needs help, but also the signs that might identify when others are overlooking things they shouldn't.

We are very un "prepped" but surely sane "prepping" runs to learning to grow your own food, installing sufficient solar power and off grid water, and maybe getting a goat - not gun stockpiling guns?