Your premise is that violence is the only thing that marks a person as having mental problems. He was actually flagged in school for extra attention not because he was violent, but because he was too timid (he went down the hallways with his back pressed against the wall, for example) and also had other problems that were probably organic, such as the inability to feel pain.
He had way more than Aspergers (although even that is a very complex problem that is far more than a language disorder, as it is sometimes portrayed) but his mother consistently avoided having him evaluated for care. Even the security chief at his school had been told to keep him under observation, so obviously other people were uneasy about him for a variety of reasons, either because they feared he would receive ill treatment from the other students or because they were afraid he would do something to himself or others. Mid to late adolescence is usually the time when full blown psychosis comes on, and these people were experienced professionals who knew this.
Violence is not the sole indicator of the need for specialized care, and one of our problems in dealing with the mentally ill nowadays is that illness is defined solely by violence. Hence, the person can’t receive any mandatory care until he has already killed or injured somebody.
One of the best suggestions so far was an article by D.J. Jaffe that just appeared in the National Review offering a five-point plan for restructuring our mental health care system (someone posted it here earlier today). And one of the key points was that there are other indicators of mental illness than violence, which usually comes only at the end of a gradually unfolding paranoia...but when it happens is devastating.
Sorry, I’m sure his mother meant well, but she’s dead herself and so are some twenty 6 or 7 year olds because of her bad judgment and massive denial of reality.
First you falsely claim that the Mom didn't think that the kid had a problem. And now you falsely blame me of the same thing. I never said that only violence marks a person as having a mental problem. Of course the kid had a problem early on. It's been identified as Aspergers.
but his mother consistently avoided having him evaluated for care.
Just because the Mom removed the kid from school, doesn't mean that the Mom didn't address the problem. The kid apparently did see a psychiatrist outside of school.
Mid to late adolescence is usually the time when full blown psychosis comes on, and these people were experienced professionals who knew this.
Again, Just because the Mom removed the kid from school, doesn't mean that the Mom didn't address the problem. The kid apparently did see a psychiatrist outside of school.
And speaking of "experienced professionals", what professional gave the kid Fanapt, a psychotropic drug known to "frequently" cause violent behavior.
Sorry, I’m sure his mother meant well, but she’s dead herself and so are some twenty 6 or 7 year olds because of her bad judgment and massive denial of reality.
Sorry, I'm sure the "experienced professional" psychiatrist that he was seeing meant well, but we have twenty-eight dead people and we have a known medication that frequently causes violent behavior.