I Am Adam Lanzas Mother

I'm sorry but I really don't agree. People have mental health issues all over the world but school shootings don't occur as regularly as they do in the USA. Maybe if guns were illegal and people stopped blaming the government, the illness, the health care etc instead of looking closer to home these tragedies wouldn't occur.
Maybe I am being too controversial? I'm sure I'll get many responses as to why I am wrong!

Making guns illegal isn't going to stop those people who already get them illegally from obtaining them. All that is going to do is stop the law abiding citizens who know how to respect the weapon from having them. No matter what is done people who obtained guns illegally will always obtain them illegally. I would be very hard pressed to find a responsible gun owner who would know how to obtain an illegal firearm off the black market. IT just doesn't happen.

And for the record most of the school shootings have been done by someone who has had some sort of deep rooted psychological issue that people knew about but ignored and also I think that there have always been these types of violent tragedies happening it's just that now the media sensationalizes it so much that we're more aware of them.

I was a translator for a non-profit that helps children with needs. A specific child I was translating for had no business being outside of a mental hospital. Unfortunately his family did not have health insurance and the hospitals wouldn't keep him. We took him up to a board and the approval process for being able to offer them any sort of medical care is SO long. In the interim he is released to go back to school and cuts himself, threatens to kill other kids, assaults a police officer and his own mother. There are MANY kids like Adam Lanza out there that need HELP. Something has to be done differently, not everyone is fortunate enough to have health insurance, but these children need help; they can't control themselves on their own.

Unforturnately, I read some of the comments on Gawker and word of warning they are not at all sympathetic to the author. Ms. Long was extremely brave in giving a voice to what so many families are experiencing, and got insulted for her trouble. I hope she doesn't see some of those comments.

Unfortunately, she will probably see the comments. Thats the thing about putting things like this out there, people will always be close minded and have something to say. I do not have children, and the children that are in my life are no where near this so I cannot say I understand what the woman is going through, or what thousands of families are going through but I do know that these children are loved, that their parents and families are trying to do everything for them, and are trying to be pro-active but without someplace safe for them to go they will never get the help they need. I do know Jail is not that place.

It breaks my heart to see families struggling to get the help they need, to get their child some place safe where they too can get help.

This is a powerful article, thank you for sharing.

I can't even finish the thing. Mentally ill or no, he needs respect. If he's that messed up, he should be somewhere where he can't hurt himself or others. For his own good and for others'. My kids ever called me stupid or a *****, let alone the two, God have mercy on them.

I just left a relationship with a man who had two boys. The oldest has ADHD and Aspergers. The youngest has ADHD and ODD (Oppositional Defiance Disorder).

His clinician said it was the worst case of ODD she had ever seen and it took me and the school YEARS to get the parents to have them assessed. They simply did not want to believe there was anything wrong with their boys. I understand that, as a parent myself I completely understand that. But the last straw was when this (then 7) year old boy lost his mind and beat the ever loving crap out of me in front of his father (for putting him on a 2 minute time out) and his father stood there in shock and just let it happen. Only to say afterwards "what did you do to set him off?"

I told him at that point he either had to get his son assessed or I would leave. He finally arranged for emergency assessment. Finally things began to make sense.

I firmly believe these boys need more help than they are getting. I firmly believe their parents are part of the broken system. I am NOT saying that parents usually are, just in this case I do believe they are. I firmly believe that these boys parents are also mentally unbalanced, maybe not as badly as these boys, however enough that it allows them to misread and misunderstand what their boys are doing/up to.

I've watched the elder boy disconnect and cut himself with box cutters to "see what would happen" or go too far in teasing and hurting people because he doesnt connect what he's doing to any consequence, and have the father shrug and say it was boys being boys.....that is NOT normal behaviour.

I worry about those boys and the lack of help they are getting, but I finally had to leave to make sure my daughter and I were safe. As much as I wish I could have done more, I had a bigger responsibility to the child *I* brought into this world and making sure she was safe and healthy and I could no longer guarantee it in that situation.

I suspect that down the road as life goes on and these boys get into adulthood, that I may see one of them on TV and it won't be pretty. That makes me sad, because I think with their intelligence they could accomplish SO much and have SO much potential.

The system needs to be fixed. But sometimes so do the parents.

It's appalling the help is not there but it'd have to get the child away from its siblings no matter what. Must be incredibly tough though x

Balancing your family's safety and the well being of your mentally ill child is beyond difficult. Most of the time, dealing with my older son is simply frustrating and annoying. Most of the time he's like a particularly big pain in the *kitten* teenager. Most of the time I can't bear the idea of him being institutionalized. When he's at his worst though...I fear for my wife and other son.
One of our options is for my wife and I to separate. She would take my younger son, I would take the older. We could visit often. This would keep them safe.
It may come to that.

I pray that doesn't happen.

This entire article describes my younger brother. I lived this for years until I moved out just to get away from him. He was extremely unstable and violent from a very young age. My mom did everything she could possible have done to get him the help he needed. Medications, years of therapy, nothing helped for more than short periods of time. She tried to have him committed to a mental institution numerous times, but they didn't have enough resources to hold him there. He died three years ago of a drug overdose at the age of 23.

I don't know if he was capable of something like what happened in Connecticut. I don't believe he was. But I worried constantly that he would kill our mother. The last time she saw him before he died she had to kick him out of her car in the middle of the street because she was terrified he was going to attack her.

I would never go as far as to say I am glad he is dead. But the world is fortunate that he never got the chance to hurt anybody.

And I agree Adam Lanza's mother is partially responsible for this for allowing readily accessible guns around him. We couldn't even have steak knives in the house growing up. Parents of mentally ill children need to be aware of what their children are capable of and do what they need to do to keep themselves, their kids and others safe.

To the OP: I am so sorry that your family has to go through this.

This woman is describing my son, my family and our lives.


http://gawker.com/5968818/i-am-adam-lanzas-mother

We haven't quite gotten THAT far, but it definitely struck a chord with me. My son is almost 17 and less than 2 months ago he bit me during a rage. He bit me SO hard that the next day I had to go get xrays done to rule out a fracture. I still have a knot on my wrist. He is on the autism spectrum, and we are attempting to have him diagnosed with IED.

When my son has a rage, he is a totally different person. We learned about 10 years ago that the best thing to do was to throw him to the ground and restrain him until he was in control of his emotions again. When he began biting, we started flipping him on his belly and pushing his face into the rug. I lift weights so I can be stronger than he is--he is now 2 inches taller than me, but I outweigh him by 50 pounds. When he bit me, I was attempting to gain control of his hands so he could not buck me off his back. I had to grab a handful of his hair and YANK his mouth off my arm. We always take pictures of any injury we sustain during an attack--that way we have proof of self defense in case CPS gets involved ( it has happened).

That was deep!