I know, it’s terrible. I had a mentally ill person in my family who actually did end up living on the streets, until she finally became old and medically frail enough that we were able to get her into a facility (where she lived out the rest of her years clean, cared for and medicated when she needed to be). This, of course, was after she had tried to kill family members, including her own daughter - and she still couldn’t be committed.
And I had a friend whose teenage younger sister simply woke up one morning, announced she wasn’t going to school, and just went crazy. The family spent every dime they had on keeping her in private facilities, but they had no way of making her stay there, and she would just leave and at one point ended up as a prostitute in another state (a not uncommon fate for the female mentally ill) and then finally died at about the age of 35, probably of AIDS.
And then another friend whose brilliant son had a bizarre break at about age 19, spent the next 15 years in and out of hospitals, often threatening to kill either his mother or himself when he was out, and then finally did kill himself.
So, in addition to the people I worked with at the group home, I have known many, many people whose lives have been completely sunk in dealing with a mentally ill person.
There has got to be a better way of handling this, but until we realize that “community based mental health care” is just a way of saying “no mental health care” and that residential care is the only way to save the lives of these people and their families (and their potential victims), we’re not going to make any progress.
I am not a doctor but some people are just beyond help. That may have been the case with Adam Lanza though we’ll never know now.