A Different Ending to My

artappraiser — Fri, 14 Mar 2014 01:16:19 +0000

In reply to The Reckoning: The father of the Sandy Hook killer searches for answers

A Different Ending to My ‘Adam Lanza’ Story
By Liza Long, Time, March 11, 2014

Long wrote the op-ed "I am Adam Lanza’s mother" two days after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, to allow herself to get help for her son. Now that Peter Lanza, the father of the shooter, has spoken out, she says she's so glad she did.

In November 2012, I happened to hear author Andrew Solomon on NPR, talking about Far from the Tree, his book on children who are different from their parents in profound and life-changing ways. “Must get this book now!” I texted to my fiancé, who sent me a nearly identical message.

We were both thinking about my son, whom I call Michael. In the later months of 2012, Michael’s behavior was increasingly erratic and violent. [....]

if such a thing could be

jollyroger — Wed, 12 Mar 2014 08:21:11 +0000

In reply to Never used meds again after

if such a thing could be found)

I believe in the infinite redemptive power of lysergic acid...

Also, MDMA will make you talkative

Ayahuasca just can't be beat for scaring the shit outta a prospective shooter

Parenthetically, I always thought that Carlos Casteneda forever earned his cred as a truthteller when he reported that his reaction to watching Don Juan jump off a cliff and fly was to shit in this pants...(that's what I'd do...)

Good article. I'm glad Peter

Peter Schwartz — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 13:18:07 +0000

In reply to Never used meds again after

Good article. I'm glad Peter is talking...

Never used meds again after

artappraiser — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 04:54:51 +0000

In reply to The Reckoning: The father of the Sandy Hook killer searches for answers

Never used meds again after having a bad reaction to trial of Lexapro at age of 14; page 3:

Kathleen Koenig, a nurse specialist in psychiatry at Yale, gave some follow-up treatment. While seeing her, Adam tried Lexapro, which Fox had prescribed. Nancy reported, “On the third morning he complained of dizziness. By that afternoon he was disoriented, his speech was disjointed, he couldn’t even figure out how to open his cereal box. He was sweating profusely . . . it was actually dripping off his hands. He said he couldn’t think. . . . He was practically vegetative.” Later the same day, she wrote, “He did nothing but sit in his dark room staring at nothing.” Adam stopped taking Lexapro and never took psychotropics again, which worried Koenig. She wrote, “While Adam likes to believe that he’s completely logical, in fact, he’s not at all, and I’ve called him on it.” She said he had a biological disorder and needed medication. “I told him he’s living in a box right now, and the box will only get smaller over time if he doesn’t get some treatment.”

The article is excellent in giving a perspective on severe autism, especially how the problems can complicate as they age. In Adam's case there was this crucial important complication of that illness, among many others; page 4:

“Adam was not open to therapy,” Peter told me. “He did not want to talk about problems and didn’t even admit he had Asperger’s.” Peter and Nancy were confident enough in the Asperger’s diagnosis that they didn’t look for other explanations for Adam’s behavior. In that sense, Asperger’s may have distracted them from whatever else was amiss. “If he had been a totally normal adolescent and he was well adjusted and then all of a sudden went into isolation, alarms would go off,” Peter told me. “But let’s keep in mind that you expect Adam to be weird.”

Still, Peter and Nancy sought professional support repeatedly, and none of the doctors they saw detected troubling violence in Adam’s disposition. According to the state’s attorney’s report, “Those mental health professionals who saw him did not see anything that would have predicted his future behavior.” Peter said, “Here we are near New York, one of the best locations for mental-health care, and nobody saw this.”

Peter gets annoyed when people speculate that Asperger’s was the cause of Adam’s rampage. “Asperger’s makes people unusual, but it doesn’t make people like this,” he said, and expressed the view that the condition “veiled a contaminant” that was not Asperger’s: “I was thinking it could mask schizophrenia.” Violence by autistic people is more commonly reactive than planned—triggered, for example, by an invasion of personal space. Studies of people with autism who have committed crimes suggest that at least half also suffer from an additional condition—from psychosis, in about twenty-five per cent of cases. Some researchers believe that a marked increase in the intensity of an autistic person’s preoccupations can be a warning sign, especially if those preoccupations have a sinister aspect. Forensic records of Adam’s online activity show that, in his late teens, he developed a preoccupation with mass murder. But there was never a warning sign; his obsession was discussed only pseudonymously with others online.

Both autism and psychopathy entail a lack of empathy. Psychologists, though, distinguish between the “cognitive empathy” deficits of autism (difficulty understanding what emotions are, trouble interpreting other people’s nonverbal signs) and the “emotional empathy” deficits of psychopathy (lack of concern about hurting other people, an inability to share their feelings). The subgroup of people with neither kind of empathy appears to be small, but such people may act out their malice in ways that can feel both guileless and brutal.

Autism is increasingly invoked in courtrooms as an argument for leniency, sometimes on the ground that the autistic person is confused about cause and effect—a befuddlement defense, as it were. Adam Lanza, however, clearly understood what he was doing.....

In this case, meds that would have made him more communicative (if such a thing could be found) may have made it possible to unveil other problems. Talk would not work without that, because he couldn't communicate.

The balance of the story is riveting and frightening, a tale of a tortured mother in denial, most probably in need of psychological help herself, and a father and brother who presumed their attempts to reach out were rejected because of severe autism/Asperger's, so they could not know how Adam was changing.

dagblog - Comments for "The Reckoning: The father of the Sandy Hook killer searches for answers"

A Different Ending to My

if such a thing could be

Good article. I'm glad Peter

Never used meds again after