Connecticut office of child advocate report on Adam Lanza

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This is a 114 page .pdf report that discusses on how his parents, schools and mental health professionals diagnosed and attempted to treat him throughout his life. This report was released Friday. It is not about the Sandy Hook massacre per se but written to give recommendations. Issues that we discuss here often are discussed in detail.

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2014/image ... rt.pdf.pdf

I agree with many parts of the report and find other parts quite questionable. I will give you some time to read it before detailing my reaction.

fail



lots of double-talk here.



more double-talk



This should've been taken into account before writing the poorly-worded findings.

The best thing about this report is how exhaustive it is, and that it challenges the myth that there is some kind of direct linkage between spectrum status and mass shootings.

It made for painful, exasperating reading though. The mother made continual efforts to get appropriate help and support from clinicians who seem to have failed to provide it time after time. Reading this, I was sadly mindful of a very recent WP thread where the anti-self-diagnosers promoted the cause for only-clinician-diagnosis on the grounds that this was the only route to correct identification, support, informed treatment etc etc. Well there was not much support for their view in this comprehensive study.

The mother may well have been on the spectrum too. Support for her seems to have been notable for its absence. Did she finally reach the point of caregiver burnout? It seems to me that she did, and the report suggested to me why she would have. She seems to have finally collapsed inwardly - the going away after AL had hurt himself suggests that to me. She couldn't go on trying to cope with the situation alone, and progressively withdrew.

The report tends to minimise the ready access to guns, (for cultural reasons, I suspect, given the gun culture in the USA). But the access to guns was the crucial, definitive, final factor in the tragedy. All the warning signs were there, lined up like toy soldiers - he was isolated, wasting away, had no significant human contact for months towards the end, he was on websites that encouraged paranoid thinking and murder, no support, and his last bastion of safety - his room - was threatened by the mother's plans to move house. The extreme anorexia was distorting his perception, and had been evident and noted by clinicians for a long time - who seemed to have offered nothing that addressed it.

Could this tragedy have been prevented? Yes, I think it could have been. Was it also a tragedy for Adam Lanza? Yes, I think it was. And that in no way is meant to minimise the utter tragedy of the other victims.

It takes a village to raise a child? Sounds so lovely doesn't it... the feel good cliche stands in stark contrast to the isolation on many levels that was going on here. No sign of extended family, neighbourhood support, social work support, respite for the mother or community concern. It was "her problem" with some concern from the estranged father though little actual practical involvement during the critical phase where deterioration was escalating.

What's the moral of this story? I will ponder that for a long time.

The report concludes in its last sentence:

There is no way to adequately explain why AL was obsessed with mass shootings and how or why
he came to act on this obsession. In the end, only he, and he alone, bears responsibility for this
monstrous act.

If there is a will, I believe there is/are ways to adequately explain it. We have an enormous amount of information in this report to do so. The conclusion above is essentially a moralistic (rather than a forensic) one, intended (I surmise) to appease populist public opinion, and protect the report writers from any backlash.

If someone is autistic and has a special interest in homicides from an academic standpoint, that's still no reason to assume they are going to be homicidal.

I plowed through all 114 pages. What it shows is the mental health system is dog s**t.

None of what Lanza did before the shooting could force anyone's hand for a 72 hour hold. Yeah, living in a room with black plastic on the windows isn't a crime. Starving yourself to a 112 pounds might get you admitted if you can get the person to the hospital.

There isn't much one can do with a legal adult who wants to check out from the world. In the states, you can be as crazy as you want, and the authorities really can't do crap. Lanz wasn't actively suicidal or homicidal. Just because you write about disgusting things doesn't make you commmitable.

Short of mom getting a sheriff to evict him from the home, I don't know what his mother could have done. If an adult is resistant to treatment, and not a threat, game over.

I hate how the media outlets have blamed the parents. Mom is a lunatic enabler and dad is checked out. I've read many parents saying they don't trust the school district or mental health professionals. So now, is everyone going to be suspect if you don't what is recommended?

I also hate that that the media said, because the family is white upper middle class, they were given a pass on not doing the follow ups. In the hood, no one cares about the poors, and Lanza would have been out on the streets by age 14. A single mom with three jobs wouldn't have the resources or time for that.

Mental institutions - we got rid of them all, and we shouldn't have. We went from institutionalizing too many people to institutionalizing nobody. Some people need to be put somewhere they can receive around-the-clock mental health care. Society needs to be protected from some people. Lanza was one of those people.

Yeah, and if he killed all of the kids with a katana (which wouldn't have been hard to accomplish when you have the murderous will), we'd all be talking about the ready access to swords or how people minimize the same ready access.

Chalk it up to someone going homicidally crazy, as there's nothing else you can go for -- 99.9999 percent of people with an ASD don't do this; 99.9999 percent of people that own an AR-15 don't do this. (You can probably put more 9s to those percentages to the right of the decimal.)

That's very easy to say in hindsight. However, I found nothing in the report that constitutes clear and convincing evidence that's he's a danger to himself or others. Lowering the threshold of proof for institutionalization endangers all of our civil liberties.

He didn't come out of his bedroom for three months.
He was anorexic and weighed 112 pounds at 6 feet tall.
He was not communicating with anyone in person - including his mother.

It seems to me that this should be enough to take him in for treatment.
Society's bar for determining whether someone is dangerous to others is set so high that it can often only be applied in hindsight. A bar that high is useless. And what about being a danger to himself? He was imposing a lifestyle on himself that, had he not already been nuts, surely would have driven him so. He could even have died from malnutrition.

I confess I didn't read all 114 pages. That sounds like clear and convincing evidence imo. The problem is that only Nancy could possible know about that and she was in denial.

The fact that people think this is already enough to be treated bothers me. I live at my parents and didn't speak to them for 3 months at one time... I was just to busy with personal projects. Yea, and that also meant that I pretty much lived in my bedroom for days only to leave for food and toiletbreaks.

In a sense I feel that if you do this, it's perfectly fine. And if you endanger yourself, fine... I rather not give up liberties nor safety in that regard. If I want to starve myself, fine... let me starve myself. The only thing that bothers me if someone takes his own life is the mess and all the paperwork, but the notion that everyone must live feels ludicrous to me.

That said; yes, could it been of use if he'd be treated? How? Mental healthcare is too expensive as it is (and I'm going to assume this is globally), and unless someone gets "fixed" and becomes an actual asset to society that pays taxes and joins the workforce, I have this idea that governments don't care because... well, money reasons.

You have the right to barely eat. You have the right to not talk to family members. You have the right not to bathe. You have the right to hang out on net forums that others consider unsavory.

Even if they found his plans on the computer, that MIGHT have gotten him a 72 hour hold. If all he was planning on using was legally owned household guns, I don't even think the police could charge Lanza with anything. (For instance, he was making bombs in the garage, he could be detained as that is illegal) He sounds like he was smart enough, if caught, to spin the plan as a story, or working on a screen play...who the hell knows.

They only thing that could have snagged him into the system is if he TOLD someone I'm going to kill myself, and or take a whole lotta people with me before I do it. Then it becomes a law enforcement issue.

You do have the right to starve to death. My long since dead, anorexic friend proved that. The hospital would not admit her unless it was an emergency situation, like throwing lethal heart arrthymias on the monitor, but then she still would sign herself out AMA after two days.

Lanza was mentally ill, on top of the autism. Mom having guns in the house made it easier from him to rage away, but he could have bought those anyway. He had no criminal record, and mom wasn't his guardian.

One thing I hope we can all agree on and that probably would have prevented the massacre is this: If you have guns, get a safe and lock them up when not in use.

This is what I'm talking about when I say the bar is set too high.
IMO, someone who locks himself in his room for three months (with the windows blacked out by garbage bags, no less) and refuses to speak with anyone is exhibiting enough symptoms of mental health issues to warrant a mandatory examination. And I don't think concern for personal freedom is the reason why the U.S. government doesn't help these people. The reason is that it's cheaper to let them die.

We will never know why because Adam Lanza did not want us to know and made effective moves to that effect.

It's good that the report points out that the emphasis on the curriculum over the emotional wellbeing is wrong, that schools are short of resources and that lack of basic knowledge about Autism at all levels is a huge problem. as they are issues we talk about here constantly.

Prior to this the mother was portrayed as dumb "gun nut". The mother made huge mistake in allowing him to use weapons, but overall come comes off as a caring somewhat intelligent person who was often steered wrong by lack of knowledge and conflating views of the professionals she sought out to help Adam. On one hand the local pschys and Adam himself who was in denial wanted him to be mainstreamed. The psych from Yale believed Adam's situation was much more severe then the local psych believed and wanted Adam to adjust to the mainstream rather then the other way around. The report sided with the person from Yale. That makes sense, if you are researching a topic you know nothing about you are going to go with the person from an Ivy league school rather then a small town psych. How it ended further seems to validate the judgment of the prestigious psych. While the person from Yale is obviously way more knowledgably then me and Adam was not my patient I find some of her judgments questionable. She wondered if the Aspergers diagnoses was correct. It was probably not Aspergers because as the report pointed out Adam had significant language issues prior to age 3. But the psych felt OCD was the major issue. While the OCD was there I just wonder where she saw the lack of autism. The social markers were there and developed at ages they commonly do, various sensory sensitivities was a huge issue, motor issues were there and certainly special interests(obsessions he liked vs unwanted OCD ones) The central premise that Adam had to do most of the adjusting to the mainstream points out the biggest problem I have with the report. No contributions from Autistic people in a report centered where how an autistic person was handled was a central theme.

In a situation like this there is always something that haunts. To me it was Adam’s paper defending a pro child pedophile organization. It was apparently a one time thing. But considering he would massacre primarily elementary school kids I can’t help but feel the answer as to “why” is largely connected to the report.