A woman raising a mentally ill son gets to the heart of the Newtown tragedy:
I am sharing this story because I am Adam Lanza's mother. I am Dylan Klebold's and Eric Harris's mother. I am Jason Holmes's mother. I am Jared Loughner's mother. I am Seung-Hui Cho's mother. And these boys—and their mothers—need help. In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it's easy to talk about guns. But it's time to talk about mental illness.
The one thing all the shooters she mentions had in common is mental illness. The one thing all their families had in common was inadequate treatment resources.
Inadequate resources are a burden to more than just the families, too:
Several weeks into his new junior high school, Michael began exhibiting increasingly odd and threatening behaviors at school. We decided to transfer him to the district's most restrictive behavioral program, a contained school environment where children who can't function in normal classrooms can access their right to free public babysitting from 7:30 to 1:50 Monday through Friday until they turn 18.
Decades ago, activists with big, hopeful hearts agitated for the "mainstreaming" of all children into public schools. Their motives were pure but the result has been a disaster. The "failure" of our public schools is at least partly the result of shutting down institutions devoted to menally unstable youngsters and shoving those youngsters into regular classrooms.
My husband is a public school teacher. Indiscriminant mainstreaming has resulted in various children attacking him with scissors, throwing furniture at him or simply laying down on the floor and screaming at the top of their lungs for 20 minutes at a time. Not only are these children not getting the specialized help they need, they are disrupting the classroom for all the other students.
Admitting that some children need a separate, controlled situation in order to learn does not deprive them of their rights. It protects everyone's rights.
When I asked my son's social worker about my options, he said that the only thing I could do was to get Michael charged with a crime. "If he's back in the system, they'll create a paper trail," he said. "That's the only way you're ever going to get anything done. No one will pay attention to you unless you've got charges."
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With state-run treatment centers and hospitals shuttered, prison is now the last resort for the mentally ill—Rikers Island, the LA County Jail and Cook County Jail in Illinois housed the nation's largest treatment centers in 2011.
These two paragraphs are very important. Go back and read them again. The second thing that Loughner, Cho, Holmes and the Columbine shooters all had in common was a lack of previous charges. Their empty criminal records kept them off the radar and beyond the reach of any social services.
What does it say about our system when the only way for a mentally ill youth to get treatment is to commit a violent crime?
Have our good intentions really become this dysfunctional?
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