dagblog - Comments for "Lanza Had Med-Induced Psychotic Break"

That's very interesting. It

Orion — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 08:10:42 +0000

In reply to More thoughts from Patrick

That's very interesting. It may be that, psychologically, alot of people under prepare for danger in this world because they are in denial of the possibility of it coming their way.

More thoughts from Patrick

artappraiser — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:08:34 +0000

In reply to There is a long investigative

More thoughts from Patrick Radden Keefe:

Did a Murderer in Waiting Go Undetected Because She Was a Woman?

News Desk @ newyorker.com, Feb.14, 2013

[.....] Anderson’s role is one of the most unsettling features of the whole affair, because either he grasped that his wife was dangerous and did nothing or he, too, was oblivious to the warning signs. While it might be tempting, even comforting, to conclude that the family members of a killer would be the first to register tremors of danger, it may actually be the case that those closest to an unstable person have too much invested, emotionally, to take a dispassionate view. Perhaps the closer you are to someone the more blinded you become to what they are capable of. Even after Waneta Hoyt confessed to smothering all five of his children, her husband, Tim, continued to assert that she was innocent. He insisted that Waneta’s confession was coerced even as she was tried, convicted, and sent to prison, and close friends and neighbors of the family agreed—as did Waneta and Tim’s one surviving child, who was adopted.

This raises a chilling question: If the killer’s own family and neighbors miss the red flags, what hope do the rest of us have?

I think you are seriously

Orion — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 12:25:00 +0000

In reply to Ok, Orion, I just gotta say,

I think you are seriously projecting again, almost propagandizing for your special interest. You seem to be reading into this story what you wish to see. Your tendency to do this almost kind of reminds me of a neo-con building the case for war with Saddam (many of them really did believe doing so would solve a lot of the Mideast's problems, ya know.)

That is a really interesting analogy and perhaps I am. The people in my support group tend to be fairly well functioning individuals - all of us had suicidal ideation and minor violent episodes - but we do things like have jobs, write for serious websites, participate in a support group, etc.

I am going based on what we know about Lanza. Asperger's syndrome may not actually be a real illness - these disorders get handed out like gospel to anyone who has trouble in their adolescent years.

Your analogy is a good one in that this is similar to Islamic terrorism - it's a ridiculous problem that has existed for several years that little action has been taken on.

There is a long investigative

artappraiser — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 11:29:48 +0000

In reply to Ok, Orion, I just gotta say,

There is a long investigative piece in this week's New Yorker that I think you will enjoy a great deal as a challenge to many of your thoughts on this issue. It's tying up the real story behind the 2010 University of Alabama in Huntsville shooting (wikipedia entry on it here.):

A Reporter at Large

A Loaded Gun: A mass shooter’s tragic past.

by Patrick Radden Keefe February 11, 2013

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/02/11/130211fa_fact_keefe#ixzz2K7CzbINq

This killer, an women academic in neurobiology (yes she was very similar in many ways to James Holmes) was never on prescription meds for mental illness. (Though she is on Haldol now, in prison.) As a matter of fact, her serious mental illness was never treated at all, and the gradual increasing development of her illness after she killed her brother at the age of 21 was enabled,aided, abetted and covered up by a caring family and a small community (of the kind I have seen you have theorize might help in situations of mental illness,) as well as a crazy husband teaching her about guns and helping her with pipebombs. The shooting itself is described at the start and sounds as emotionless and cold as any of the other mass killings, maybe worse because she knew the people she was shooting.

It also delves some into the big picture, with thoughts like this on the first page

After massacres involving gun violence, from Columbine High School, in 1999, to Sandy Hook Elementary School, in December, one of our national rituals is to search for some overlooked sign that the shooters were capable of such brutality. “This is not a whodunnit,” Amy Bishop’s court-appointed lawyer, Roy Miller, observed after the Huntsville attack: Bishop left nine living witnesses to her crime. The question was why. After the shooting, the press initially focussed on Bishop’s professional disgruntlement. (A headline in the Chronicle of Higher Education asked, “IS TENURE A MATTER OF LIFE OR DEATH?”) But Miller suggested that the problem was more complicated. “There are people in our community who are walking time bombs,” he said, adding, “They are so hard to identify.”

and this near the end of the piece:

When violence suddenly ruptures the course of our lives, we tend to tell ourselves stories in order to make it more explicable. Confronted with scrambled pieces of evidence, we arrange them into a narrative. Faced with the same tragic facts, those who concluded that Amy Bishop murdered her brother and those who concluded that she didn’t both took messy events and turned them into a story. But neither story was especially convincing.

The caricature of Amy as the demonic sister who sought inspiration in the pages of the National Enquirer before murdering her brother in cold blood is too facile, as is the cynical narrative of a secret handshake between John Polio and Judy Bishop that kept the truth buried for decades. In the months that I spent talking with people in Braintree, I came to believe that there had indeed been a coverup, but that it had been an act not of conspiracy but of compassion. In small towns, in particular, some degree of denial about what happens behind the closed doors of one’s neighbors can come to seem not merely exigent but humane. “I’ve always believed it was an accident,” Amy’s friend Kathleen Oldham told me. Then, echoing a sentiment that I heard countless times, she added, “And I’ve always said, If it wasn’t, I didn’t want to find out.” Some of the police officers in Braintree knew the Bishop family. Judy knew the parents of some of the younger cops, through the Town Meeting. It may have seemed that the most charitable way to address the confounding tragedy at Hollis Avenue was simply to move on—a parochial gesture of mercy and denial that had an incalculable cost, decades later, in Alabama.

Ok, Orion, I just gotta say,

artappraiser — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 10:11:04 +0000

In reply to Lanza Had Med-Induced Psychotic Break

Ok, Orion, I just gotta say, can't just let your commentary on this link just sit here without commenting on it---

I think you are seriously projecting again, almost propagandizing for your special interest. You seem to be reading into this story what you wish to see. Your tendency to do this almost kind of reminds me of a neo-con building the case for war with Saddam (many of them really did believe doing so would solve a lot of the Mideast's problems, ya know.)

There is nothing here in this Daily News story that says Lanza Had Med-Induced Psychotic Break, nothing. It simply says he had a psychotic break. (And that itself is just hearsay, but you're not even happy with that without altering it to imply it was caused by meds.)

The story itself implies his mother pushing him to get out of the house and to get help caused a psychotic break, that he couldn't handle that. It is not implied that drugs caused a psychotic break, that is not in this article. Back to that in a minute.

First, this kind of reaction has been reported by others as happening with Lanza in the past. Just hearsay, again, but at least it's available in quantity (as opposed to evidence of drugs or drug withdrawal, which is not.)

Like for example, here in a The Telegraph article, where it also says his brother said he had a personality disorder as well as being on the autism spectrum:

"Adam Lanza has been a weird kid since we were five years old," said Tim Dalton, a neighbour and former classmate, on Twitter. "As horrible as this was, I can't say I am surprised." "This was a deeply disturbed kid," a family insider said. "He certainly had major issues. He was subject to outbursts from what I recall."

A further family friend said he had acted as though he was immune to pain. "A few years ago when he was on the baseball team, everyone had to be careful that he didn't fall because he could get hurt and not feel it," said the friend. "Adam had a lot of mental problems."

Lanza's brother Ryan reportedly told police that his sibling had autism or Asperger's syndrome, and a personality disorder.

He gave no details, but anti-social disorder - also known as sociopathy - is the type most closely linked with violence and criminal behaviour. Studies have suggested that 50 per cent of the prison population meet the criteria for the diagnosis.

Those with such disorders are more likely to embark on impulsive, risk-seeking behaviour, in an attempt to escape feeling empty or emotionally void.

In such cases, they are likely to have little regard for the consequences of their actions, and are unlikely to experience fear.

Ryan also said that he had not seen him since 2010.

[....]

Those on the autistic spectrum have a more limited emotional range and can miss social cues, making it more difficult for them to communicate and feel empathy with others. Difficulties communicating can cause frustration, which can spill over into aggression.

[....]

Here's more on Adam not talking to his brother nor to his father for the past two years.

Do you really trust his brother to know exactly what his brother's problems and diagnoses and meds were in the last two years? I don't. Why do you trust the diagnosis of autism here? Based on what? How do you know he wasn't misdiagnosed and developing schizophrenia? How do you know he wasn't misdiagnosed all along with Aspberger's (you yourself have posted on how questionable a diagnosis it is,) when he really might have had a severe personality disorder with increasingly violent outbursts? You don't know. We don't know what was wrong with him.

Ok, let's get back to the meds in the Daily News story. The whole article is based on an interview with one Lanza family friend who was telling the reporter what the police asked her when they interviewed her. He/she said “They told me they think he had a psychotic break and were asking if Nancy mentioned anything (to me) about Adam not taking his medications,” the friend told The News AND The friend couldn’t provide the police with any new information.

So the police were asking if he/she knew anything about any meds he was taking or not taking and this friend said he/she knew nothing about him taking meds or not taking meds! That is all! The focus of the story, the one that the reporter is playing up, is that police are following the idea of a psychotic break. Not a "med-induced" psychotic break. A psychotic break, like the kind when you're mentally ill like Norman Bates at the Bates Motel and your mom's pushing and hammering on you and you don't want her to be doing that. That's what the Daily News is getting at here, trying to play up.

I humbly suggest you should also think about how the police are probably not on your side here, that they probably think that a mentally ill person taking meds is a good thing, and a mentally ill person not taking his meds is a bad thing. If they think or know that he was taking meds at all. And that is why they were asking this family friend--it's probably more like they are looking for someone to say this|: oh yeah Nancy mentioned to me two months ago that the psychiatrist wanted Adam to try taking XXX, but she couldn't convince him to do it or anything else.

Next point. Do the police think or know that he was on meds?

The real truth: We simply do not know:

Prosecutor Reviewing If, When Details of Adam Lanza's Mental State Can Be Revealed

By DAVE COLLINS and SUSAN HAIGH, Associated Press, Jan. 29, 2013

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Connecticut lawmakers on Tuesday began reviewing mental health care following the deadly Newtown school shooting, even though they and the public have little insight into the mental state of the 20-year-old gunman.

The prosecutor in the case, Danbury State's Attorney Stephen Sedensky III, said he cannot release information about Adam Lanza's mental health because of the Connecticut Rules of Professional Conduct, which covers all attorneys in the state. His office is reviewing whether details of Lanza's mental state can be released to the public after the police report is completed, possibly in June.

But Jeremy Richman, father of 6-year-old Arielle Richman, one of the 20 first-graders killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, told a legislative subcommittee on Tuesday that it is clear Lanza did not commit an impulsive act of violence, but rather a planned crime with the "goal of achieving infamy" like other mass shooters.

"The shooters in Sandy Hook, Tucson, Aurora, Littleton, Blacksburg — we will not grant them the respect of using their names — were not in their right minds," said Richman, who, along with his wife, has started a foundation in their daughter's name to protect vulnerable groups from violence and to understand the mental underpinnings of violent behavior.

"Too little is known in the mental health area about what drives these violent behaviors," he said. "Clearly, something is wrong with the person capable of such atrocities."

Besides gun violence and school safety, two task forces created by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and the General Assembly are focusing on mental health services and reducing the stigma of treatment as they review public policy and recommend law changes after shooting [....]

So until you hear it from Danbury State's Attorney Stephen Sedensky III, and you're going to have to wait quite a few months to hear from him, all we really have on this is hearsay.