<p>This is long, but very interesting. </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.ct.gov/oca/lib/oca/sandyhook11212014.pdf”>http://www.ct.gov/oca/lib/oca/sandyhook11212014.pdf</a></p>
<p>So many missed opportunities by so many people!</p>
<p>The first problem was his mother, as she seems to have been in denial about the severity of his problems.</p>
<p>But his mother was not the only problem. The Newtown, CT, school system didn’t give him needed services. And his “community psychiatrist”…did you read about him?</p>
<p>The report was fascinating, and very sad. It certainly damns the “community psychiatrist.”
“A kid I treated twenty times, who later shot up a school and murdered two classes of first graders? Why would that be notable? I don’t remember him at all. No recollection.” Yeah, sure. I bet the psychiatrist’s records on AL were in the fireplace the afternoon of the shooting.</p>
<p>We look at this with 20/20 hindsight, but if we want to blame the actors we should look at things as they were then. At age three, AL had a constellation of symptoms that scream autism or another serious developmental disability, but he was not diagnosed by his pediatrician or by the Birth to Three evaluator. Pediatricians and state evaluators are, I hope and believe, a lot more vigilant now. I don’t think this diagnosis would have been missed today.</p>
<p>AL’s elementary school was legally required to diagnose his disabilities, and develop an appropriate plan for him (an IEP). They ended up missing most of his diagnoses, and just treating his expressive language. I would like to believe that the situation for a similar young child would be better, but I’m skeptical. Teachers aren’t trained as evaluators, and the natural tendency for both parents and teachers is to hope the child will grow out of his problems. This was true then and is true now:</p>
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<p>I hope that we draw the right conclusions from this report. </p>
<p>OF COURSE Mrs. Lanza should have taken away the guns.</p>
<p>But most children with Adam’s problems won’t end up shooting up schools. Taking away Adam’s guns would still have left an undiagnosed and untreated child. We don’t diagnose kids like Adam only to prevent the very rare occurrence of violence. Rather, we need to prevent kids like Adam growing up miserable and turning into adults who can’t function in society because they didn’t get adequate support as children. And that adequate support is still, mostly, missing.</p>
<p>The long list of recommendations in the report is fantasy. What is happening to make their recommendations a reality? Nothing much as far as I can tell.</p>
<p>I agree, CF – that’s a long fantasy list of recommendations. I guess it makes them feel good to get that out there, even if it’s just filed away somewhere. </p>
<p>The commmunity psychiatrist fled the country. He thought he could destroy records after five years, when the law is apparently seven years. </p>
<p><a href=“Dr. Paul Fox Archives - AbleChild”>http://ablechild.org/tag/dr-paul-fox/</a></p>
<p>From the above article, this is the link to the full investigative report on the community psychiatrist:</p>
<p><a href=“http://d3no3gvrzfecbz.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/FoxRecords.pdf”>http://d3no3gvrzfecbz.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/FoxRecords.pdf</a></p>
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<p>Well, this part is certainly inflammatory. "Parents (as in all of us?) " are “dependent and necessarily reliant” on professionals and "look to them “to know what should be done for their child”? Um, no. Most parents figure out something is wrong and likely, what it is, and then go find some corroboration from professionals and teachers, and then decide what to do on their own. Most of them find a solution. Somehow, Adam’s mother did not follow through. </p>
<p>God help us all if we are “dependent and necessarily reliant” on professionals and teachers. Parents are the first line and main line of defense. </p>
<p>Absent dad, divorce and implosion of his family in the teen years, and Adam, already emotionally unstable, just snapped. Father “did not think the children were negatively impacted by the separation”. Yeah, right. </p>
<p>Other than a few noted issues in early childhood, there is actually not a whole lot in the report about Adam that sounds all that terribly abnormal for introverted pre-teen/teen boys until the later teens, other than a few vaguely reported things - and the fact that his weight dropped to 98 pounds, at 5’8"! I would love to see that “Big Book of Granny” that Adam may or may not have written (it says) that they go on and on about. It also suggests that Mom had many issues of her own, especially after the divorce, and was so overwhelmed that she didn’t follow through on Adam’s issues. </p>
<p>Anyway…rambling here, but it was interesting. It does sound like the psychiatrist is covering something. </p>
<p>Is that the same guy? He lost his license for being a sex abuser.</p>
<p>For the life of me, what I will never understand is why mom outfitted him with firearms. Wouldn’t a stable of horses to raise been a more therapeutic option? </p>
<p>IMO, she should have (1) secured the guns, because everyone should, and (2) gotten rid of the guns as AL became more obviously mentally ill. But I don’t fault a person who was brought up with guns from taking her kids shooting. Apparently, the kids enjoyed it, and with a kid as difficult as AL, I can’t fault a mother for trying to find a family activity that the kids would like.</p>
<p>My 2 cents:</p>
<ol>
<li>You can read ex post reports like this about nearly everything. Traffic accidents, nuclear accidents, training accidents, you name it.</li>
<li>I’d bet a ton of money that vast numbers of kids with problems are poorly served by social services and for a wide variety of reasons. My point: we notice when one of those kids does something horrible and forget that there are hundreds of thousands - likely millions if you consider all ages - with serious issues who have not been treated or not treated well or “slipped through the cracks”, etc. </li>
<li>We fixate on what caused this particular incident. This is always true, and we fixate when the system can be improved and when it can’t, when intervention may or may not have mattered as though each case could have been avoided. Given the vast numbers involved, it’s irrational to believe anyone could expect such an outcome. As in if there are 1 million poorly served people with mental problems - which is very low estimate - and the number of mass killings is tiny, it’s absurd to believe somehow this particular case mattered more than every other ignored or damaged individual. In other words, we constantly apply backwards reasoning and fail to see that for nearly all his life Adam Lanza was just another kid with issues and, further, that he was better off than all those kids with less involved parents (or parents at all) and less money. </li>
<li>Much of our reasoning - meaning “our” in the general sense - is deflection. As in, if Adam Lanza did not have access to weapons, this would not have happened but weapons are inherently American and even are, to many, the highest right of all, so therefore it must be a failure elsewhere. The more shootings, the more deflection. I’m not trying to be political, just analytical. Deflection has become part of American culture when it comes to guns. I hate to say it but this is the same as the deflection in the Arab/Muslim world that as things get worse and worse, you see more and more blaming of “Zionists” and the US - as in, ISIS is a creation of Zionists and all the discord is a product of … Deflection is our original sin as humans. Think of Adam and Eve: when God asks what did you do, Adam blames Eve rather than say “I ate the apple” and Eve blames the serpent rather than say “I ate the apple”. And that lack of personal responsibility showed God they didn’t have wisdom, just awareness, so he banished them from Eden before they could eat the fruit of immortality. It’s unclear if the original message was that we should learn or that we can’t. I think it’s pretty clear we can’t.</li>
</ol>
<p>Yes, the report says that the community psychiatrist was convicted of sex abuse. </p>
<p>Nancy Lanza received very specific treatment advice from the Yale team but she declined to follow their recommendations. The suggestion is that she found a community psychiatrist that would follow her bidding (by, for example, providing a note saying Adam was homebound and should not attend school at her request without clinical support, when that was exactly the wrong approach).</p>
<p>There was a lot of extremely interesting info in the report that had not previously been made public. For example, I had previously seen emails in which Nancy Lanza told friends that she had a life-threatening autoimmune condition that was in an acute phase. I had long wondered why there was no reporting on her condition. The report confirms that she had told friends and family over a number of years that she was critically ill, and that she had told many people, including her husband, that she had been diagnosed with MS. But the report says that there is absolutely nothing in her medical records suggesting she had any autoimmune disorder or MS and her autopsy showed no indication of any such disease. She hadn’t even reported symptoms consistent with such disorders to her physicians. She apparently just made the whole thing up. Not sure how (or whether) this plays into the tragedy but it is very strange.</p>
<p>One thing that is clearly linked to the tragedy – the report says that the FBI found the degree of Lanza’s obsession with mass murderers (as demonstrates by online activity) to be UNPRECEDENTED in their experience. And that the “Granny” project that Adam did in 5th or 6th grade was so depraved that it was far, far outside of anything that would be considered normal, even taking into account that many boys have a fascination with violence and the macabre and defining normal broadly to include such interest.</p>
<p>The report also says that, at the time of his death, Adam Lanza was anorexic to such a degree that the autopsy showed brain damage consistent with malnutrition. </p>
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<p>This is hindsight cherry-picking. She was also getting contradictory advice from others in a position to evaluate her child. </p>
<p>The report indicates that they had no evidence that the Lanzas knew about the Granny thing. The other parent didn’t, did they?</p>
<p>Thanks for the links, very informative.</p>
<p>This makes me pause about some really disturbed children I have seen. When one girl I was seeing told me about how she planned to dissect a cat, she was hospitalized. Her grandmother never brought her back to me for treatment. I wonder what has happened to others.</p>
<p>Nancy Lanza inventing a debilitating illness; was that a cry for help?</p>
<p>The supports that the Lanzas were supposed to be relying on don’t always exist. Notice that they tried to find a therapeutic school for AL, but couldn’t.</p>
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<p>The actual quote from the report, with my bold but the report’s italics, is:</p>
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<p>But the school was not staffed by mental health professionals, and we have no information that either of the families involved even knew about the book, let alone got a recommedation from the school for an evaluation (an evaluation which the school was responsible for performing).</p>
<p>Three professionals failed to spot my own child’s depression and severe LDs. Because he was generally cheerful in school, (adept at masking his often-deep anxiety), shared little about his problems at school with his parents and said professionals and has an exceptionally high IQ and skills that helped fill some of the gaps due to his condition, not one of these three professionals (including one who saw him once a week for 3 months) pushed for specialized testing. His issues were dismissed as “boys are like this, he’s less mature than other kids, he’ll outgrow this phase.”</p>
<p>It took a major nervous breakdown as a college freshman to get him the testing, diagnosis and, finally, the counseling and meds he needed. </p>
<p>Granted, my son’s issues aren’t anywhere near to where AL’s problems were. But we are an example of parents who sought help at three different times from three different “professionals” – and got bubcus until it was almost too late. </p>
<p>I don’t know what AL’s mother did or did not do for her boy. I do know that it’s possible to seek help – and not get it. </p>
<p>A lot of health professionals, including several mental health professionals, missed my child’s Aspergers. My son’s problems aren’t as nearly bad as AL’s either, but if you imagine that taking a child to be evaluated by professionals is the answer to life’s questions, you fail to understand the reality of mental health diagnosis as it currently exists.</p>
<p>It’s clear, and documented in the report, that on numerous occasions the Lanza family sought help and didn’t get it.</p>
<p>I didn’t see in the report that the Lanzas tried to find a therapeutic school but couldn’t find one. I thought the report said a therapeutic school was recommended but they refused to even consider it.</p>
<p>I also didn’t see any indication that other professionals had provided conflicting advice that the Lanzas decided to follow instead of the Yale program’s advice.</p>
<p>I don’t understand the point about post facto reports. They are often critically important to understanding what went wrong. The takeaway from this report seems to be that parental denial can be an enormous impediment to a child’s ability to get adequate mental health treatment. Not that controversial of a conclusion. The details of how it played out in this particular case are eye-opening at the very least.</p>
<p>From page 58:</p>
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<p>There may have been therapeutic schools available for AL, but I can assure you that finding educational options for a kid of average to better intelligence with an autism spectrum disorder is far from straightforward. Even finding the people who know how to find the schools is in no way easy. And just because a school charges a lot of money and says they can handle your child doesn’t mean they can (she says bitterly).</p>