<p>Flossy, here is the question to which I was responding:</p>
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<p>Perhaps considering that will help you respond more constructively.</p>
<p>I would have advised her against putting him in his own apartment alone; I don’t see how isolating a person who wants to be isolated makes them less isolated. It’s not so much that I think it would be a risk as that I can’t see any upside.</p>
<p>I would have advised her to find and see a therapist for herself, if possible a therapist familiar with Aspies and family issues. I would have asked the therapist I know in this area if she could recommend someone in Sandy Hook.</p>
<p>I would have suggested that she ask other parents of Aspies what they were doing. I don’t know whether NAMI would have been the right resource; I’ve never heard any parents of Aspies talk about it. It would have been worth a try, anyway. (I wouldn’t have suggested it then because I only heard of it from this thread.) </p>
<p>The Lanzas had all the money in the world, so possibly some sort of live-in coach/intervenor might have worked. It’s a long shot, though.</p>
<p>Besides that, I’ve got nothin’.</p>
<p>I agree, Flossy. It makes people feel less helpless to think that <em>some</em>thing “coulda shoulda woulda” been done to prevent Adam’s massacre. This type of massacre happened before and, sadly, will happen again. Civil liberties reign supreme. </p>
<p>It does strike me as incomprehensible that a young man who was capable of committing mass murder, and who was living under the care of a parent, was not seeing a mental health professional of any sort. I read that Adam hadn’t been seen by a therapist for many years. Could Nancy or Peter have forced that treatment? Not sure but perhaps that is what lead Nancy to conclude that she could no longer care for her son at home.</p>
<p>I think I agree that a friend would likely tell Nancy that she needed to start by getting some counseling for herself, and perhaps some other support as well. Maybe she didn’t have any friends. Or maybe she did, and that’s what they told her, but she wouldn’t.</p>
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<p>They could not have forced the treatment. He was an adult.</p>
<p>^^^^^And even if they could, how effective is therapy with an unwilling participant? Not very, I’m thinking. </p>
<p>I have a family member who is a family therapist. He said that often he has couples come in for marriage counseling because one of the spouses has begged for or demanded it. He can tell when one of them is NOT on board and has already mentally and emotionally retreated from the marriage. He says that under those circumstances, the therapy is doomed from the start. It’s the couples who come in both wanting to salvage the marriage who have the only chance of success, and even then, they don’t all make it.</p>
<p>Adam neither believed he needed help nor wanted it. “You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge.” I hate to quote Dr. Phil, but in this case, I agree.</p>
<p>Adam had spiraled into his own mental illness. His mother who was so wrapped around getting through from one minute to the next had lost any ability to see his behavior clearly. His father and his brother had abandoned them. Dad can hide behind stating that Adam did not want him there but the reality is he left and did not reengage. </p>
<p>What needed to happen was for someone to call the emergency psych line and state that this kid was a danger to himself or others. This is when you call and lie through your teeth and say “Adam has a knife and came towards me in a threatening manner”. This one statement will bring the police to your door. If you sign the commitment papers Adam is taken to the local emergency center and evaluated. And then who the heck knows what will happen. …he may be admitted, he may be sent home.</p>
<p>When people are acting so irrationally it is frightening. This is an understatement. It is FRIGHTENING! Parents are afraid to call as they know there is a chance this person will be let go to come back home and be VERY angry with them.</p>
<p>Setting Adam up in his own apartment is probably what needed to happen at this point. No one was willing to kick Adam out of the house. Adam would apparently not see a therapist. Parents could have called the police then and stated he was not caring for his basic needs. That could have resulted in hospitalization. Going out of his apartment and acting bizarrely would also result in the police catching up with him.</p>
<p>Either way it is the police responding now, trained professionals with guns. </p>
<p>Sure beats the elementary school teachers.</p>
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<p>And the evidence for that at the time was what? There are tens of thousand of Aspie kids retreating to their bedrooms and playing video games right now. Are you going to stick all of them in psychiatric hospitals?</p>
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<p>This is a terrible, awful, dreadful, offensive idea. That some untrained professional should be able to get a person detained by lying is appalling. </p>
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<p>Not caring for one’s basic needs is not enough for hospitalization, as one can see at a glance by looking at the streets of any major city.</p>
<p>Sorry cardinal. I truly believe this is the best way to handle this particular situation. </p>
<p>Yes, it is a terrible thing to lie. However all this lie would do is have Adam be seen immediately by a trained professional who can then determine if Adam was indeed a threat. </p>
<p>Adam was mentally ill at this point. We know he was mentally ill as he shot and killed 20+ people and then killed himself. He was not just an Aspie kid playing video games in the basement.</p>
<p>In many states not caring for ones needs is enough to have a person evaluated.</p>
<p>The whole point is to have gotten this young man into the mental health system one way or another.</p>
<p>If Adam was not mentally ill then he was just a mass murderer. I just don’t get that from reading about his behavior.</p>
<p>Do we even know that he was not capable of caring for his basic needs or that he was likely to wander the streets acting bizarrely? Or set fire to something? That was not my impression. But, the biggest problem with this plan is that at best he goes away for a few days and comes home with a bag of pills and a whole lot of anger. Actually, I have no real problem with the lying part if I thought it would produce any results. How many trained professionals have failed to foresee murder or suicide? I suspect it’s fairly common. And, as CF points out there are plenty of mentally ill people wandering aimlessly in nearly every reasonably sized downtown. </p>
<p>here is an article discussing what it takes to have someone forced into being seen by a psychiatrist. It is in Virginia but is a good idea of the process.
<a href=“http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/component/content/article/358”>http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/component/content/article/358</a></p>
<p>Many people out on the streets are not mentally ill. They are drug addicts and alcoholics also.</p>
<p>If Adam was my son I would have lied in a heartbeat if I thought it would help him.</p>
<p>If you reread the original article you can see that Adam had deteriorated greatly. </p>
<p>Cardinal Fang, you keep putting this in the context of Adam being an Aspie ONLY. Adam was an Aspie, but he also appeared to have had a severe mental illness. The latter is what brought this situation to a crisis. The latter is why I suggest NAMI. (<em>I</em> called NAMI a couple years ago when a friend of mine was wandering the streets in a paranoid state. They are very, very helpful. They have been there, and know what it is to struggle with the mental illness of a family member who cannot be forced into treatment.)</p>
<p>He NOW appears to have had a severe mental illness as well as the Aspergers and the OCD. But I think that wasn’t so obvious to his parents at the time. I didn’t mean to diss NAMI; I’m sure they’re a great organization and they might have helped Nancy Lanza. </p>
<p>^exactly why his parents needed support and external resources…It may not have been obvious to his parents that Adam was deteriorating, suffering with mental illness, however it would have been clear to an experienced mental health professional by his level of functioning, isolating and paranoid behavior,</p>
<p>Exactly. It seems as if the Aspergers diagnosis served to mask the existence of mental illness for the Lanzas. It is natural that they were, in a sense, grateful for a diagnosis that explained a lot of things about Adam. I completely agree that they didn’t realize it at the time. But as Nancy and he sank further and further into their private hell, I think the only thing that could have turned things around, at least for her, was a mental health professional or support group who could have helped her see that this was not all explained by Aspergers. </p>
<p>There are many, many young people, people of all ages, with similar issues to Adam’s, but it is fortunately very rare that all things come together at the same time to explode into the horror that occurred in Sandy Hook. Like a “perfect storm”, but really that phrase does not begin to touch how terrible this was and is. I don’t doubt for an instant that there are others out there right now with nearly the same things going on, BUT, how many live with a parent who has that type of semi automatic weaponry AND how many such kids are so well trained on how to use those weapons?</p>
<p>It’s pretty clear, that Adam Lanza wanted no fight. He shot himself as soon as it was evident that authorities were on their way. The advantage he had with the type of fire power he had was so overwhelming that I doubt that a security guard sitting at the door would have had a chance. Just another head count if that had been the case. It’s very difficult for someone to cause that much death and destruction so easily and in such a short amount of time. Those weapons made it so possible. </p>
<p>But, yes I do think that there are plenty of other Adam Lanza types out there, but all the pieces hardly ever come together as they did for him, and few have such opportunities. I wish something had been found to shed light on why he picked an elementary school to do those damages. </p>
<p>I strongly recommend listening to the audio of Adam’s call:</p>
<p><a href=“Adam Lanza Audio: Newtown Shooter Compares Travis The Chimp To Anders Behring Breivik [LISTEN]”>http://www.ibtimes.com/adam-lanza-audio-newtown-shooter-compares-travis-chimp-anders-behring-breivik-listen-1542886</a></p>
<p>I must have read it earlier in this thread that there was an unconfirmed rumor that a car matching Adam’s might have come to the high school that morning and there were cops there, so he may have turned around and gone to the elementary school instead. It could have been something as simple as that. </p>
<p>I do find it interesting that he picked any school he wasn’t actually attending. It makes me wonder if he didn’t really put any thought into who his victims should be, and either just decided “I want to be like those school shooters,” or just figured a school would have a lot of people in it and limited security. It’s a lot easier to kill 30 people in a short period of time in a school than, say, a shopping mall. In an office building there might have been too many adults that were big enough to overpower him, or might have had guns of their own(?). He might know the layout better of a school he’d once attended than an office building, makes more sense. Who knows. I’ve also heard a theory he targeted Sandy Hook specifically to hurt Nancy, which seems as likely as anything else.</p>
<p>I wish there was a transcript of that call. I don’t think I want to hear it, but I’m curious what it says.</p>
<p>He started attending Sandy Hook in first grade, right? I wonder if it was his old classroom he attacked.</p>