It’s far more effective to change yourself, and make yourself a harder to kill target.

Those who rely upon the police and the military for protection, have no control when the S hits the fan. All they can do is whine about it later, at the funerals.

Those who wish to live life, must get their hands dirty, for once in their life.

Mrs. Whatsit’s was beautifully written and so ringing with truth.

Those reports seem to have been the equivalent of rumors, as far as I can tell. I’ve never seen anything reliable that substantiates them at all.

More to the point, in the New Yorker article this post is dealing with, nothing of the sort is mentioned. In blert’s comment above, he wrote [emphasis mine] “If [Adam Lanza] was really as screamingly crazy as now claimed.” “Now claimed” would be assumed to refer to the New Yorker article, or other comments in the thread, and nowhere in the article or in the comments does anyone make such a claim.

I seem to recall media reports at the time of the event to the effect that, precisely because of his recent behavior, the mother was making arrangements to have him admitted to an inpatient facility– something he did not want. And which was speculated to be a precipitating factor to his rampage. Is that theory off the table now?

It’s unspeakably sad.

It must have been hard for him to give this interview. Hopefully, by going through this he will find some peace.

Yep, it is far too easy for those of us NOT involved to make a snap judgment.

You write: “If he was really as screamingly crazy as now claimed – why was he not receiving much more professional intervention? It’s not as if the family was short on money.”

But no one is claiming that Adam Lanza’s behavior prior to the moment he began to kill was crazy at all, much less “screamingly crazy.” That was the point. Adam Lanza presented as a completely non-violent child, teen, and young man who was always in touch with reality, who had Asperger’s syndrome of a fairly typical-seeming type.

Nothing especially crazy about him, nothing that would raise that sort of alarm—at least, nothing any other human being (and that includes therapists and other health care professionals) could see prior to the murders.

What’s more, it was recognized from his early childhood on that something was unusual with him and he was not neglected in terms of seeking help for him. He was already getting special speech and occupational therapy from kindergarten on, so he must have been coded. He seemed happy enough till junior high, at which point his parents took him for further evaluation.

From the article:

When Adam was thirteen, Peter and Nancy took him to Paul J. Fox, a psychiatrist, who gave a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome (a category that the American Psychiatric Association has since subsumed into the broader diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder)…

But Adam would not accept the diagnosis.

Peter and Nancy, who remained amicable in dealing with their children’s needs, looked into special schools, public and private. Peter went to a meeting of the Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership (GRASP) to talk to adults on the spectrum and to try to imagine a life for his son. He hoped that “eventually we could get him into GRASP and he would form relationships and maybe get married to somebody else with Asperger’s.” Nancy considered moving to a town fifty miles away, where the school system had strong programs for children with special needs, but concluded that the disruption involved would cancel out any benefits. She briefly enrolled Adam in a Catholic school that seemed to offer more structure, but that didn’t go well, either. Fox recommended homeschooling, arguing that the disadvantages of sending Adam to a regular school were worse than those of isolating him from his peers. From eighth grade on, Nancy taught Adam the humanities and Peter met with Adam twice a week to handle the sciences.

So, to recap: as soon as Adam seemed more unhappy than he had as a young child, they took him to a psychiatrist and received a diagnosis that seemed correct. They followed all his recommendations, including the homeschooling. They were amicable in their dealings with each other around Adam. When Adam was fourteen (that’s just a year later) they took him for further evaluation at Yale’s Child Study Center. Then “Kathleen Koenig, a nurse specialist in psychiatry at Yale, gave some follow-up treatment. While seeing her, Adam tried Lexapro, which Fox had prescribed.”

So he had a bad reaction to the medication and thereafter refused to take any medications. Adam continued to be in denial about his diagnosis and to refuse medication and talk therapy as well after that.

I have no idea how you got the idea (a) that anyone was calling Adam’s behavior “crazy” prior to the murders, or thought he was at risk for violence; (b) that his parents used him as a pawn or “war prize”; or (c) that Adam could have received any more psychiatric intervention than he got, under the circumstances (or that it would have done any good). He could not have been involuntarily committed with this particular set of circumstances. He could not have been forced into more therapy, nor into taking meds.

Adam’s problems appear to have been almost certainly something he was born with. Of course, a parental environment can make things somewhat better or somewhat worse, depending on how the child is treated. But Adam’s parents appear to have done a very good job under very very trying and largely unrewarding circumstances. I could come up with various criticisms (for example, the withdrawal of the father in the last two years at Adam’s request, and the stronger and stronger isolation of Adam along with the mother). But no parent is perfect, and considering the trying circumstances, they seemed to be doing fairly well by him. In no way can they said to have neglected taking him for professional help, especially since the more help he got the more negative he became about receiving any more help.

You write towards the end of your comment, “As for daddy’s interview, he comes off to my ear as a Nazi at Nuremberg. He was uniquely an insider – yet professes that just standing around makes him an innocent.” I fail to see anything of the sort. It is almost the opposite. Where does Peter Lanza say he is innocent? In fact, he seems racked with guilt. If he can’t put his finger on what he might be guilty of, it’s probably because there isn’t any specific thing, nor is it clear that any other path would have led to a different outcome, except that Peter Lanza would probably have been blown away that day, too. To compare him to Nazis at Nuremberg is totally inappropriate.

Blert’s commenting about different dynamics for bright children reminds me of one of my teaching experiences. Training manuals for teachers tell time and again to not use sarcasm on children. In general, this is a good idea. However, I occasionally used sarcasm when dealing with magnet school -very bright- students. They were bright enough to catch it. I never used sarcasm on regular students- it would have gone over their heads.

Regarding what happened with Adam in the family dynamics, most of us- or none of us- will never know.

Anyone who knows parents of a teenager or young adult with mental illness is aware of the almost insuperable obstacles to getting appropriate treatment, even if the professionals can figure out what the appropriate treatment is — which here, apparently, would have required reading Adam Lanza’s exceptionally inscrutable mind. And anyone who has raised any child, healthy or not, knows that it’s a whole lot easier to pass judgment in hindsight than it is to figure out what’s best to do as you fumble along through the years in a haze of love and fear and fatigue. It’s easy and comfortable to blame Adam Lanza’s father for his distance, or the mother for her guns, or both for something, anything — so much more comfy than having to accept that sometimes these events are incomprehensible and unpreventable and not the obvious fault of anybody. That would mean it could happen to you, too, or to someone you love — unacceptable for some, who must comfort themselves with judgment unsupported by any facts.

Of course I don’t mean to suggest that broken kids are never the parents’ fault. I spend my days reading court papers about neglectful, abusive and murderous parents who most often were made into what they became by the abusive generations that came before them. But here, the only clear evidence of fault is that projected upon the parents by our own fears and our reluctance to accept the unacceptable.