Right at the time the deinstitutional thing was starting, my father was diagnosed as a nervous breakdown. After a year in a state hospital, he was sent home where they thought he would get better being around his family [with three small children].
He couldn’t take the noise of small children, got violent by throwing things around, then started loading his gun. Mom shoved us all out the back door grabbing coats on the way as dad was in another room with his gun.
We walked four miles through deep snow [through fields hoping dad couldn’t find us] to the farmhouse of friends.
When next we saw dad, he confessed that he intended to kill all of us so was put back in the hospital for a year.
The doctors never told us what was wrong with him. We found out 40 years later it was paranoid schizophrenia after he tried to kill my mother twice and threatened a neighbor with a gun.
Before he got sick he was very mild and loving, never violent.
We never had a chance to protect ourselves and didn’t know what was wrong with him all those years when he was turned loose on society. He had a psychotic break at work on three different occasions and no one who was there will tell us what he did. We sure didn’t know what to do to help him, save tiptoe around the house and never make noise because he couldn’t take it.
I think the doctors who handle patients like this don’t know what they are doing. They ought to have to live with their patients, maybe they’d have compassion on family members.
We [my surviving brother and I] ended up putting him in a nursing home where he was locked up and had no guns. We had to protect others even though no one protected us.
As to the Virginia Tech shooter, it is more of the same. No one knows what to do so they do nothing, turn them loose, someone else’s problem.
You have my sympathies. I have some horror stories from my childhood like that, too. The terrible things that the mentally ill do to their own families are never taken into account by the psychiatric profession.
My mom had a mental breakdown about 20 years ago. It got so bad that my dad finally called the police and had her put in a mental institution. The thing is that was only good for a few days. She was the one that had to commit herself. Thank God, she did. She was diagnosed as manic depressive and put on lithium.
A few years later, she decided she didn’t really need the lithium and she got off of it. The whole cycle started again. Thank God, my dad and brothers (I was in a different state) convinced her to go to the hospital.
However, if she doesn’t want to commit herself and she doesn’t take her medication it is a huge hassle to try to commit her. Family members have to hire a lawyer and go to court and it is a huge financial and time burden. I don’t think many non-family members would be able to do much unless a person has already committed a crime.
I don’t know quite the correct way to handle it.
It must have been gut-wrenching to make that decision, but it was the responsible one.
Speaking of responsibility, VT, the doctor who evaluated him, and the law may share blame in Cho's case, but what of his family? From the anecdotal evidence thus far -- his grandparents, neighbors, schoolmates -- he was apparently troubled even as a small child. You have to wonder if his parents ever attempted to get him professional help, or to make the hard decision to have him hospitalized.
My father killed himself and had been contemplating killing some or all of us children too. He practised suicide several times; he wrote everything down in his diary, which I read. His parents took him to a psychiatrist who did not/could not commit him; I don’t know if they read the diary, but they left us alone with him sometimes. This was in 1973. Paranoia and depression were normal in some circles - part of the anti-establishment world-view.
I think a lot of mental health professionals believe that extreme alienation from society is often just and reasonable, because society is so unjust.
Mrs VS