Posted on 12/21/2012 5:42:08 PM PST by Sioux-san
The recent post "I am Adam Lanza's Mother" by a woman who posts at anarchistsoccermom and animatedly advertises herself wearing an "I love Che" t-shirt is as slick a piece of exploitative propaganda as anything we've seen in the last four years. Soon after the essay went viral mom blogger Liza Long appeared on CNN and the Today show calling for a national conversation on mental illness.
After the Newtown massacre the self-described author, musician, Classicist and single mother of four felt compelled to share her own story. Long's written account of life with an out of control child focuses solely on her son. She's brutally honest when it comes to his behavior but omits any mention of several other contributing factors for his dysfunction: family dynamics, Michael's early years, Dad's behavior before the divorce and afterwards, her own use or non-use of medications and why she would pump him with psychotropic drugs when the inexplicable cause of his violent outbursts confounded everyone...did this also include family counseling, spiritual guidance, an in-depth clinical look at Mom and Dad's behavior, or traumatic events passed from one generation to the next? If Ms. Long indeed fessed up to some family secrets why doesn't she address that in her poignant, gut wrenching depiction of Michael?
Is access to treatment the problem? During a December 19 press conference the President stated as much when he said, "We're going to need to work on making access to mental health care at least as easy as access to a gun." Media accounts of Klebold's, Harris', Hui Cho's, and Holmes' and Lanza's parents suggested they had more than enough financial resources to seek out the best treatment for their sons.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Sometimes they do.
Sure, they CAN. You want visible marks or not?
Should they be? Not in this life, not with failure prone humans in charge. Not by the rules I live by.
/johnny
I don’t want to generalize or point fingers, but this woman appears to me to be a classic narcissistic mother, and having a narcissistic mother is a sure path to emotional problems and potentially lifelong mental health issues. It’s all about her.
I think the schools are creating a lot of them by teaching subjective reality. From kindergarten a good many are being taught that the earth is dying and its all the fault of their parents. They’re being taught that grandma is greedily using up all the resources. Homosexuality is normal and heterosexuality is an oppressive imposed lifestyle. This kind of crap continues all the way into college.
Children who might be mildly neurotic but grow up to be otherwise fine are being put under enormous psychological stress through their formative years.
I am Joe Biden’s mother. Well......he called me a mother the other day.
And you’d think I was an absolute floozy for all the people here on FR who call me mother.
You know, back in the 50’s and 60’s, we had lots of guns in homes, and lots of teens with “issues”, yet I don’t recall seeing many accounts of massacres.
I blame the absent father! Also..there is NO such thing as mental illness...it is demon possession and the devil loves hiding in falseness.
Compare a teacher from the 60s and 60s to one from today and I think you’ll find a major source of problems.
Lol.
About 40 years ago, the government forced God to be taken out of the classroom. They succeeded. Now there is no teaching of right and wrong, good and evil. Is it any surprise without a moral compass that some fraction of children turn into monsters.
As long as we do this, attack the parents, they will stay in them shadows. I saw firsthand a nightmare. My childhood friend adopted a baby (Puerto Rican boy). After she had two natural sons. As the adopted son grew up, he TERRORIZED this family. This was a professional, intact family. She is a family counselor! they did everything they could do. By the time he was 16, they were living in fear of him, as he had grown big and was physocally abusive. Exhausted and at their wits end, they went before a judge and asked for them to TAKE the boy out of the home. Can you imagine how hard that was? the judge said NO and turned around and told the court that she must be a terrible mother. Both her other sons were honor students. So, until we stop blaming the parents and just take care of the situation no matter how the kid turns out the way he/she turns out, nothing will change.
There’s a mix of nature and nurture in determining the behaviors of anyone.
For much of this century, psychiatry and psychology overwhelmingly focused on nurture. Parents were blamed for schizophrenic children.
It’s become abundantly clear in the last couple of decades that severe mental disorders like schizophrenia and autism are almost entirely nature and have NOTHING to do with how a parent raised a child (schizophrenia is genetic, and also possibly related to odd things like a disease acquired from cats. etc.)
That said, in terms of serial killers (remember to differentiate from mass killers), ALMOST all of them underwent severe abuse by a parent in childhood (the striking exception is Dahmer where no evidence has ever been uncovered of abuse, and Dahmer was torturing and killing animals at a very young age.)
A lot of people are very emotionally (or religiously) resistant to the idea that something like genes or a medical condition can determine your behavior. There are a shocking amount of people on FR who seem to literally not believe mental illness exists as a medical disease (but yet believe in things like demonic possession, despite this being the year 2012, not 1402, last time I checked.)
She actually has an “I Love Che” shirt?. She admires a torturer and mass muderer and then wonders why her son is violent?
For every psychological disorder of children, there is a blame-the-mother contingent, as with the author here. Those theories just don’t stand up to investigation. It’s usually the case, as it seems here, the dangerous child has normal siblings. It’s also the case that the frightening behavior is not unique to the dangerous child. We have to admit that we don’t know why a particular person commits mass murder, and many other similar people do not. No one has been able to predict it even in the short term of days ahead of time, and it certainly cannot be predicted from childhood years ahead of time.
Of course the scientific study is worth while, but it will not yield anything useful soon. Meanwhile the one thing we can do is protect whatever we treasure from the possibility of such and attack. We protect the president, his children, his officers, members of congress, governors, and mayors with little armies of armed guards. Celebrities do the same for themselves and their families. It’s a good idea for schoolchildren, too.
Who knows if that was a legitimate post. I agree that mental health services need to be more accessible. If only Adam Lanza’s mom could have provided her son more mental health care...
I agree. There is a reason why one of the Lanza sons landed a plum job at Ernst & Young while the other sadly went down a dark path. Mental illness was probably the deciding factor.
I don’t think this was the point of the author. Sometimes the parents are to blame and sometimes they aren’t. To declare parents and parenting off limits doesn’t help anything. If your kid murders a bunch of people, you need to be part of the inquiry...if you survive...
We had a case here in the summer of 2011 where a guy murdered an elderly neighbor and cut her head off.
He was estranged from his family because they couldn’t convince him to get help and the courts couldn’t force him. The family knew someone was going to die but were helpless to stop it.
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