I stumbled onto this piece titled, “I am Adam Lanza’s Mother: A Mom’s Perspective On The Mental Illness Conversation In America.” This mother encapsulates another facet of the conversation we need to be having alongside gun control policies–how do families and we as a country support those with mental illness? Viviana has been raising our awareness to supporting family caregivers of those with physical disabilities and this piece reminds me both of the strain and the stigma of caring for a loved one with mental illness. Her remarks concerning how we currently use the penal system to treat mental illness resonated with and saddened me as well.
“According to Mother Jones, since 1982, 61 mass murders involving firearms have occurred throughout the country. Of these, 43 of the killers were white males, and only one was a woman. Mother Jones focused on whether the killers obtained their guns legally (most did). But this highly visible sign of mental illness should lead us to consider how many people in the U.S. live in fear, like I do.
When I asked my son’s social worker about my options, he said that the only thing I could do was to get Michael charged with a crime. “If he’s back in the system, they’ll create a paper trail,” he said. “That’s the only way you’re ever going to get anything done. No one will pay attention to you unless you’ve got charges.”
I don’t believe my son belongs in jail. The chaotic environment exacerbates Michael’s sensitivity to sensory stimuli and doesn’t deal with the underlying pathology. But it seems like the United States is using prison as the solution of choice for mentally ill people. According to Human Rights Watch, the number of mentally ill inmates in U.S. prisons quadrupled from 2000 to 2006, and it continues to rise — in fact, the rate of inmate mental illness is five times greater (56 percent) than in the non-incarcerated population.
With state-run treatment centers and hospitals shuttered, prison is now the last resort for the mentally ill — Rikers Island, the LA County Jail and Cook County Jail in Illinois housed the nation’s largest treatment centers in 2011.” Read more…
ADDITIONAL info since originally posting:
Since my initial post, I’ve had a chance to read a critique of it by Slate’s Hanna Rosin. Rosin raises some good points about protecting the anonymity of this son, about the integrity of the writer, and so forth. All good things to keep in mind (she especially hits on something I’ve been pondering of late about the slippery genre of blogging-this modern mix of readily accessible personal/public writing), but nonetheless, I think the article continues to raise our awareness to the difficult and often isolated role that family caregivers for the mentally ill play. The Institute of Medicine has named “depression” as one of the 9 key chronic illnesses that will shape family caregiving over the next twenty years. Living with or caring for someone battling some form of mental illness most likely touches all of us. From a pastoral care perspective, the most exhausted and often lonely people I have known are those living with someone they love who lives with some form of mental illness. Finding ways to support them is critical to our being a more humane society.
Categories: General
Is the marriage movement the answer to the “Adam Lanza” problem? I don’t mean to suggest that a more marriage-minded society could have prevented this, specific tragedy. It would be completely crass and inappropriate to do so, and impossible to prove to boot.
But maybe there is something about the larger argument that is worth considering. Mental health and other developmental problems tend to be more pervasive among children of older mothers and women tend to delay childbearing in cultures where divorce is prevalent so that they can establish themselves in careers where they can take care of themselves if the marriage doesn’t work out.
Likewise, the data pretty consistently shows that delinquency is much higher for children raised by divorced parents especially if one or more of those divorced parents are remarried. Also, children with mental illness or disabilities of some sort tend to fare much better when raised in intact households with their biological parents to share the burden of caregiving. Attachment disorders, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Conduct Disorder and Anti-Social Personality disorders are much more prevalent in divorced or single-parent households than among chidren of intact households.
What’s my point? Well, if we use any of the above to try to assess the “why’s” of the Sandy Hook tragedy, then I would say I don’t have a point at all. You just can’t competently or reasonably or even appropriately conduct that kind of analysis.
But if you consider the situation in the aggregate, I think it is not entirely unreasonable to suggest that unless our culture gets serious about protecting and supporting marriage and, specifically, households where married mothers and fathers take responsibility for raising the children they conceive, then I suspect we should not be surprised to see more, not less, of this kind of horrific tragedy in the future.
I pray I am wrong.
One of the things we keep seeing over and over in these tragedies is someone with known mental health issues + access to guns.
I think that is they key here.
Hanna Rosin’s article was tiresome linkbait.
Mental health issues such as schizophrenia and autism are more common amongst older fathers actually.
(and older mothers may be more likely to be married to older fathers).
However these disorders represent only a small portion of all mental health disorders.
Not that this has anything to do with Adam Lanza.
If I consider the situation in aggregate, what do you mean by aggregate? There is no evidence that upbringing had anything to do with most of these random killers.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/stop-crime-it-starts-funding-mental-health-facilities-instead-prisons/kbjDNhBV?utm_source=wh.gov&utm_medium=shorturl&utm_campaign=shorturl
I agree with mythago. Hannah Rosen was being nasty. Yes, there is an issue of confidentiality, but most of the criticisms of the mom were way out of line and over the top. Her blogs are the kind of complaining with a bit of irony and sarcasm a lot of people do. And if people were really concerned about confidentiality and the kid’s life, they wouldn’t be linking back to her blogs and quoting all the bad things his mom said so that everyone on the Internet could insult her.
@Greg Popcak – If there’s no evidence for a direct link between marriage and divorce and this horrific crime or others like it, why bring up the issue now?
It would be hard to come up with a better way to turn people off from the marriage movement.
Re “I am Adam Lanza’s mother”:
I’m glad you posted this, Amy, even though the link is not working, simply because somebody does have to speak for the mothers, and the families, of these kids who commit these horrible acts.
What I’ve seen after these acts occur is a never spoken, but just as real, disturbing attitude: “who cares about the families of these monsters. They produced them, after all, didn’t they”.
Now Adam Lanza’s mother is not here anymore, but in the cases where they are not killed, can you imagine what the parents of these kids go through. I wish the media would just take a little time to look at that, whether the child’s act can be linked to mistakes the parents made in their upbringing or not.
It brings up something I’ve wanted to get off my chest for years, relating to the Columbine tragedy, and particularly the narrative around one of its victims, Cassie Bernall.
As I’m sure most here recall, Cassie Bernall was the child killed by Eric Harris who, according to the narrative, when asked by Harris whether or not she believed in God, unhesitatingly replied “Yes”, after which Harris shot her.
Now, other witnesses dispute the account given in the press at the time. But I’m not disputing Cassie’s faith in God or anything like that. What really irritated me was the way people were so blind to how this false narrative was rubbing another huge dose of salt into the horrible wounds which the families of Harris, and Klebold, were already suffering.
The false narrative was that Harris killed Cassie because she said she believed in God. The narrative implied further that Harris and Klebold were not only horribly disturbed kids who went on a murderous rampage, but they also were acting out of a contempt toward God and anyone who said they believed in God.
I don’t recall what the religion of Harris and Klebold’s parents was, or if they even were religious. But effectively, they were now being told not only that their kids had engaged in a killing spree, which they of course had, something that has to be unimaginable for parents of the killers to deal with already. They were also being told through the media via the Cassie Bernall narrative that the boys were militant God-haters who were killing anyone who said they believed in God. This was heaping more salt on their parents suffering, probably even more so if the parents were themselves religious, but even if they were not.
It is indeed possible that the boys asked Cassie or some of their other victims about whether they believed in God before killing them. And this is not unheard of in multiple killings. But the reason is often apparently to ease the mind of the victim….and, perhaps, the killer…by assuring them that if they believe they’re going to Heaven they have nothing to worry about. (Another who is said to have asked just this of his victims was John Linley Frazier, who killed a doctor and his entire family in California in 1970. Frazier is said to have asked each of his victims if they believed in God, when they replied in the affirmative, he said that then they had nothing to fear).
Any less twisted: Absolutely not. Any less heinous: No. But replace it with the image of demented God-hater and it does add an even worse element to the picture, probably even more so for religious parents.
Of course the prime focus must be on the victims and their families in these events. No disputing that. All I’m hoping is that the media also think a little about what the parents and families of those who engage in these acts are already going through before they readily believe narratives that add an even worse layer to it than there already is.
So 43/61 whites only make up 70% of serial gun killers, disproportionately smaller compared to their population percentage. Yet the old “serial killers are usually white” stereotype persists.