Posted on 01/10/2011 6:51:58 PM PST by kristinn
Reporting from Tucson — The parents of Jared Lee Loughner, accused of shooting Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 19 other people, were huddled in seclusion in their Tucson home Monday night, his father crying and his mother so shaken she could not get out of bed, a neighbor told The Times.
As the sun was beginning to set Monday, Randy Loughner called his neighbor, retired gasoline truck driver Wayne Smith, 70, to ask him to get their mail. Smith, who is not particularly close to the Loughners, grabbed the mail and was invited inside.
"They're in there now," Smith said in a subsequent interview with The Times. "They're both in there crying. He's crying and hanging on to me and she's not even out of bed."
Smith described the Loughners as very private and said they knew few people on their street, although they had lived in the neighborhood since before Jared, 22, was born. He said Jared was their only child. Smith said Loughner's mother, Amy, had a good job with good retirement and pay, and Randy was a stay-at-home dad who liked to work on cars.
"He worshipped the boy," Smith said.
SNIP
All three wept together outside on Saturday. "We stood right out there and cried for an hour. I'm a softie," Smith said. "A man needs compassion. He's broken up about his son, but also about all those people who died."
Smith said the family is intensely private. "The best way I can describe it, they're like a mountain man," he said. "They want to be alone."
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
True. Sad. True.
As we’ve said, it’s extremely tricky for a parent of an adult to force mental health care.
And it has one of “the most progressive mental health laws in the country,” according to The Washington Post, permitting “[a]ny person, including any of the students in Loughner’s classes ... or any of his teachers” to petition “the court to have him evaluated for mental illness
“College administration issued a letter of immediate suspension,” officials said in a statement. “Two police officers delivered the letter of suspension to the student at his and his parent’s residence and spoke with the student and his parents.”
According to Pima Community College officials, Loughner and his parents met with Northwest Campus administrators Oct. 4.
“During this meeting, Loughner indicated he would withdraw from the college,” officials said. “A follow-up letter was sent to him Oct. 7, 2010, indicating that if he intends to return to the college, he must resolve his code-of-conduct violations and obtain a mental-health clearance indicating, in the opinion of a mental-health professional, his presence at the college does not present a danger to himself or others.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/01/what-about-the-parents/69176/
He was a volunteer at the Tucson Book Festival, held on the University of Arizona campus. It has numerous sponsors, and the stated aim is to promote literacy, which was one of Loughner’s rants.
He was also a volunteer at the Pima Animal Control Center.
I’ve read no reliable report of any paying job.
We have past incidents where other various local agencies have had concerns about his mental health. Does that mean he’s insane? I don’t know,” Captain Chris Nanos of the Pima County sheriff’s office tells The Daily Beast/Newsweek.
It just struck me as odd that you could seem so positive about something that no individual on The Earth could be so certain about.
Every mental health professional that I have ever seen or heard of appeared to need treatment more than any patient.
Unstable individuals gravitate to the mental health professions in a futile hope that they may eventually understand the flaws within themselves. The few that were stable soon become unhinged in the education process when their peers use them as convenient emotional guinea pigs.
“I mentioned schizophrenia a number of times and so have numerous others. It is quite obvious that it is the most likely problem Loughner has.”
Well, I am going to wait until the Psychologists have a chance to evaluate Loughner. I am sure that Psycho-Eval will be extensive and ordered by both the Prosecutors, the Defense Team and the Court.
I am sure it will be illuminating and time consuming.
Too bad it wasn’t done earlier in his life.
And as someone upthread said mental health professionals focus on out patient treatment now. Even with a psychiatrist's strong urging to institutionalize the institutions will often turn them down.
Suit yourself.
It strikes me as odd that you would level another unfounded accusation at me without even saying what it is.
You’re not the only one who has noticed that - many have commented on it.
I know you didn't reply to me regarding this, but EXACTLY....that is what I was talking about in my first post to you.
The police were called because my relative became very violent towards another family member. The police took one look and knew she was in a completely different reality, and gladly (and gently) took her into custody directly to the hospital.
Whereupon, the looney-tune psychiatrist interviewed her for 30 minutes, and believed her completely fabricated story that the family was only attempting to steal her money and control her life. He even berated the victim family member for attempting to control the independent life of an adult child.
I will not tell you what line of the work the ill person was in; however, the psychiatrist even OK'd the person to go back to this job...which could have been an unmitigated disaster.
Fortunately, with years of persistence and incredible frustration, the situation has been handled (and you know how it goes) for now.
In California, it was more than forty years ago that involuntary commitments were eliminated by the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, an act which was essentially copied by many other states.
But, it wasn't forced on us just by libs. It received bi-partisan support in the legislature.
And, it was signed into law by our then governor, Ronald Reagan. (I've been told that he later felt that it was a major mistake.)
Well, I did say ‘libs’ not ‘Dems.’ Was Reagan still a Dem then? At any rate a lot of people were buying into the phony liberal view of compassion in those days. Their means and methods of propaganda weren’t as well known to the public then.
Really? You might want to read this:
You link to this thinking it refutes my point? Allowing their child to live this life of permissive excess with their heads in the sand is exactly what I am talking about. The parents deserve the blame. There was mental illness in the family! He was a poster for "Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry!"
Their two other boys were near-4.0 GPA students. Mark was the more creative one, the guitar player, the left-handed artist who didn't apply himself in high school and got mostly B's and an occasional C and D. His class was unusually large, and, in the good parts of his childhood, Mark could be found hanging out with the gang, rumbling through the northeastern Iowa town of about 2,000 with his blue-and-white 1971 Monte Carlo. He was so connected to the car that his friends called him Monte. Now the old ride sits covered and unused in a shed on the family farm.There were hints of problems as early as his sophomore year in high school, but nothing staggering enough to lead the Beckers to believe that it was much more than teenage growing pains. In hindsight, there is something of a history of mental illness in the family, but it didn't bear out until Mark was well into adulthood. A son of one of Joan's cousins was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia within the past year or so; another relative has bipolar disorder.
When Mark started to pull away and withdraw from his friends, Joan asked him why he wasn't hanging around with the group. "It's too noisy, Mom," he'd tell her. Too many people. They were once close, and he used to tell her everything.
"I remember one day he came home from school and just started crying," Joan says. "He wouldn't talk about it.
Prof. Called 911 on Loughner after Class “Rant”
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/01/10/earlyshow/main7230271.shtml
Anyone that thinks it is a cut and dried deal to get help for a relative with mental illness doesn’t know what they’re talking about. The authorities can be more of a problem than a help.
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