Family members are way too invested. Adam Lanza’s mother, who obviously had decided that her whole life was about “protecting” him, would never have made that call.’
There should be a panel and regular reviews. But I can tell you, having lived under the old involuntary committal system in NYC up to the years after Geraldo Rivera’s report on Willowbrook (which was extremely distorted), that things were much better under the involuntary commital plan, and it had nothing to do with your political opinions.
Are you living in the subway on on a heating grate in a cardboard box, going out only to menace people, even though you’re collecting good money in SSI? You need to be institutionalized.
Are you a teenager writing screeds about killing your classmates, random people who have offended you, or your mother and father? You need to be institutionalized.
This kid’s mother protected him, and of course she was the first one killed. But the only positive thing I can possibly say about her (although his school had apparently wanted to get him either examined or referred before she took hi out of it) is that probably treatment would have been virtually impossible to get, especially in CT after the ACLU fought and defeated the law requiring people like him to get at least outpatient care.
Yeah, I lived through the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill in NYC throughout the late 60s and all through the 70s.
I do know that there were some state mental hospitals that were very poorly run. And, of course, we had people like R.D. Laing who was going around saying that mental cases were far more sane than the average middle-class person. Remember that?! Oh, those 60s - what have they wrought?