You guys. I obviously can't give details, but we are going through something SO eerily similar with a student in our school. It scares the living FUCK out of me.
[The Anorexia issue is complicated by the fact that those on the spectrum can have significant food issues. My suspicion would be he didn't have anorexia so much as sensory/behavioral issues related to food that impacted how much and what he ate. But again that is my personal suspicion
This makes sense and is very much in line with the idea that Nancy wasn't treating his issues but placating them. So if he didn't want to eat whatever, she just let that go.
I worry that this report makes it far too easy for people to say, "Well see, if mom or dad had done X,Y,Z then this never would have happened..." which takes the conversation away from a more societal-level one about gun culture.
I worry that this report makes it far too easy for people to say, "Well see, if mom or dad had done X,Y,Z then this never would have happened..." which takes the conversation away from a more societal-level one about gun culture.
I do wonder if she just gave up on treating him. A single mom of a child with severe needs would almost certainly have had needs of her own that weren't being treated.
i used to have sympathy for nancy. deep down, it was my fear to raise such an angry, hurt child.
but now? nope.
fuck her. the blood of those kids are on her hands. im sad he shot her first.
I do feel sorry for her. I am baffled--like seriously baffled as to how it was CLEARLY stated to her (and her husband) that Adam had some serious problems and they just...let it go. They put on the blinders and did something else that was so, so wrong.
The only thing I keep coming to is that Nancy was also mentally ill/ or I kind of suspect she was on the spectrum too and undiagnosed or something and was untreated.
I honestly think that 99.9% of the people in this post would read the results of the Yale finding and be like "yep, yep, get this kid some SERIOUS help ASAP. Like NOW." For her to take the reign and reject that expert help is so odd, I cannot help but think there was something wrong with her, which makes me sad that she fell through the cracks as well.
It also makes me mad at her H. Nice support a-hole.
On a side note...I'm 5'6'' and weigh 112 lbs and people tell me all the time I'm small. He must have been tiny tiny. Super disturbing.
Post by penguingrrl on Nov 22, 2014 16:20:24 GMT -5
It seems like his parents really did drop the ball here. They left his illness untreated and his mother kept an arsenal in the house despite knowing her child had untreated mental illnesses. That's the least responsible parenting I've ever heard of.
I'll admit that within all of this I can't help but wonder if there was a financial aspect to the lack of treatment as well. Not that it's excusable, but I wonder if their insurance company denied treatment and they decided that if the insurance company felt it was unnecessary it really was (which is bullshit, but these people haven't shown the highest intellect). And proper treatment for him would have bankrupt just about anyone if insurance denied it, even those who are well off. ****NOT THAT THAT'S AN EXCUSE**** But I would be very curious to see if the insurance company denied payment on stuff and that deterred them from taking it further.
I just keep thinking of the thread where everyone was sharing how the system has let them down. It's so easy to say, "she could have done xyz!" And skip merrily away. When the reality is that it's hard to get the system to help even when you have the diagnosis.
I just keep thinking of the thread where everyone was sharing how the system has let them down. It's so easy to say, "she could have done xyz!" And skip merrily away. When the reality is that it's hard to get the system to help even when you have the diagnosis.
That's true. Even when you follow every proscribed step getting help can be nearly impossible.
The mental health system can't stop you from making your house into an armory with ammunition in every closet. If we were talking about Adam going into the woods and hanging himself I'd agree with you but he was basically given the opportunity to easily do tons of damage.
The mental health system can't stop you from making your house into an armory with ammunition in every closet. If we were talking about Adam going into the woods and hanging himself I'd agree with you but he was basically given the opportunity to easily do tons of damage.
Yes, I will always say that his mother was an asshole for having weapons in the house and that was inexcusable.
I just keep thinking of the thread where everyone was sharing how the system has let them down. It's so easy to say, "she could have done xyz!" And skip merrily away. When the reality is that it's hard to get the system to help even when you have the diagnosis.
That's true. Even when you follow every proscribed step getting help can be nearly impossible.
And, getting help is not curative. Let's be clear on that.
I just keep thinking of the thread where everyone was sharing how the system has let them down. It's so easy to say, "she could have done xyz!" And skip merrily away. When the reality is that it's hard to get the system to help even when you have the diagnosis.
I'm surprised there seems to be so much more sympathy for the mom who killed her son with ASD..
Because in this case 20 tiny children were murdered in their desks, that's what there is less sympathy here.
But he couldn't force his adult child to have contact with him.
I have never read anywhere that adult Adam Lanza wanted never to have contact with his dad. Even so, what parent stops attempting a relationship with a sick child?
I thought he had emailed his father to tell him basically this.
I want to know more about this anorexia business and does anyone know if it's presumed Nancy had her own mental illness?
I just finished reading the full report.
There is a section early on that indicates that she told people, and possibly believed, that she had MS and was going to die -- she told at least one person that she expected to die within months, back in 1999, but didn't want to cause her family "worry" or whatever, and asked that person to keep it "confidential". She apparently told some doctors and not others, some people and not others, but didn't indicate there was a family history of MS in her son's evaluations or when it was time to provide health documentation for insurance.
There's no indication that she was ever diagnosed with MS. And her autopsy showed no signs of MS. Apparently even her husband believed she had been diagnosed with MS until they showed him the lack of medical documentation.
I just keep thinking of the thread where everyone was sharing how the system has let them down. It's so easy to say, "she could have done xyz!" And skip merrily away. When the reality is that it's hard to get the system to help even when you have the diagnosis.
I'm surprised there seems to be so much more sympathy for the mom who killed her son with ASD. We really have no idea what demons this woman was facing. There are a lot of complexities in how something like this happens and a large part of the cause is systemic, not just the behavior of one parent.
I have a lot more sympathy for a mother who reacher her breaking point and snaps than for a mother who enables her son to commit mass murder.
The VERY LEAST YOU CAN DO as the parent of a seriously disturbed child is to NOT supply them with deadly weapons, let alone weapons capable of murdering dozens of people in a matter of minutes.
I have never read anywhere that adult Adam Lanza wanted never to have contact with his dad. Even so, what parent stops attempting a relationship with a sick child?
I thought he had emailed his father to tell him basically this.
The only time Peter Lanza spoke with the media is over several months with the New Yorker
According to him there was pushback on contact from the mother and refusal from Adam. He even talks here about the idea of just showing up at the house. He is the only one able to talk about what went down and I don't presume that his word should be taken as the truth but he has at least cooperated in the Yale examination per the OP's referenced article and made the emails available including his own presumably
Peter took Adam to visit Norwich University, which has a military program, but they concluded that Adam should take classes at Norwalk Community College, near Stamford, before attempting campus life anywhere. Adam wanted to take five classes, but Peter said it was more than he could cope with, and suggested two classes that they could work on together. Peter went to pick him up for a weekend visit, and Adam refused to go. Peter said, “Adam, we’ve got to figure out a system so I can work with you.” Adam was angry. “I hardly ever saw him pissed, but he was pissed,” Peter recalled. “And it was, like, ‘I’m taking the five classes. I’m taking them.’ ” It was September, 2010: the last time Peter saw his son.
Earlier that year, Nancy had written, “He does not want to see you. I have been trying to reason with him to no avail. I don’t know what to do.” An e-mail that Adam sent Peter to get out of another meeting sounded innocuous—“I apologize for not wanting to go today. I have not been feeling well for the last couple of days”—but Nancy’s updates painted a more fraught picture. “He is despondent and crying a lot and just can’t continue. . . . I have been trying to get him to see you and he refuses and every time I’ve brought the subject up it just makes him worse,” she wrote. Nancy surmised that Adam resented Peter’s warning about the heavy course load.
Peter was frustrated but felt that he couldn’t show up at the house in Newtown to force an encounter. “It would have been a fight, the last thing I’d want to be doing. Jesus. . . . If I had gone there unannounced and just, ‘I want to see Adam.’ ‘Why are you doing this?’ Adam would be all bent about me.” Later, Peter remarked, “If I said I’m coming, she’d say, ‘No, there’s no reason for that.’ I mean, she controlled the situation.” Peter tried to remain conciliatory, and never introduced Adam to Shelley, suspecting that it would be more than he could handle. (He did introduce her to Ryan, who had moved to New Jersey after graduating college.) He considered hiring a private investigator “to try to figure out where he was going, so I could bump into him.” If he had, he might have discovered that Adam went regularly to a local movie house to play a game called Dance Dance Revolution, spending up to ten hours at a stretch listening to music and trying to keep up with complex dance moves on an illuminated platform. He was still doing so a month before the shootings.
I wondered how Peter had felt through this period. “Sad,” he said. “I was hurt. I never expected that I would never talk to him again. I thought it was a matter of when.” He asked, “How much do you accommodate the demands and how much do you not? Nancy tended to, as did I.” Peter added, “But I think he saw that he could control her more than he could control me.” Adam had also cut off communication with Ryan, whom he last saw two Christmases before the shootings. According to Peter, Ryan reached out several times, but Adam never responded. Peter and Shelley now suspect that Adam deliberately shut them out to hide his psychological decay. Peter said, “I didn’t understand that Adam was drifting away.”
By 2011, Nancy’s messages had grown terse. Peter attributed this to his remarriage rather than to a change in Adam’s condition. That October, a little more than a year before the shootings, she related that Adam “has been doing very well and has become quite independent over the last year. He is starting to talk about going back to school which would be nice.” But the state’s attorney’s report notes that people who worked on the property couldn’t enter the house and were warned never even to ring the doorbell.
In early 2012, Nancy said that Adam had agreed to see Peter in the spring, but nothing came of it. Nine months later, Peter protested that Adam never even acknowledged his e-mails. Nancy wrote, “I will talk to him about that but I don’t want to harass him. He has had a bad summer and actually stopped going out.” She said that his car had sat unused for so long that its battery was dead. She played down the significance of Adam’s failure to answer his father’s e-mails: “He stopped emailing me a year ago or so, but I assumed it was because he actually started talking to me more.” However, the state’s attorney’s report suggests that Nancy’s account was misleading: Adam had stopped speaking to his mother and communicated only through e-mail. “It bothers me that she was telling me he doesn’t use e-mail at the same time she was e-mailing him,” Peter told me. He thinks Nancy’s pride prevented her from asking for help. “She wanted everyone to think everything was O.K.”
The authors also questioned whether Mr. Lanza’s privileged upbringing had helped him fall between the cracks. The report did not offer an answer.
Since when do those with privilege "fall between the cracks"? That is not the same as using resources to get out of trouble. That seems more like affluenza than falling between the cracks.
In any event, it seems a LOT of mistakes were made - at some point someone could have gotten CPS involved if they thought the parents were leaving a child with a serious illness untreated. But nobody wanted to deal with this, it seems.
I think the point is that if this kid hadn't been rich, the school would have been like "no you need to do something, just keeping him home is unacceptable." But because these parents were rich and educated the school took their word for it that they were taking care of everything.
According to him there was pushback on contact from the mother and refusal from Adam. He even talks here about the idea of just showing up at the house. He is the only one able to talk about what went down and I don't presume that his word should be taken as the truth but he has at least cooperated in the Yale examination per the OP's referenced article and made the emails available including his own presumably
Peter took Adam to visit Norwich University, which has a military program, but they concluded that Adam should take classes at Norwalk Community College, near Stamford, before attempting campus life anywhere. Adam wanted to take five classes, but Peter said it was more than he could cope with, and suggested two classes that they could work on together. Peter went to pick him up for a weekend visit, and Adam refused to go. Peter said, “Adam, we’ve got to figure out a system so I can work with you.” Adam was angry. “I hardly ever saw him pissed, but he was pissed,” Peter recalled. “And it was, like, ‘I’m taking the five classes. I’m taking them.’ ” It was September, 2010: the last time Peter saw his son.
Earlier that year, Nancy had written, “He does not want to see you. I have been trying to reason with him to no avail. I don’t know what to do.” An e-mail that Adam sent Peter to get out of another meeting sounded innocuous—“I apologize for not wanting to go today. I have not been feeling well for the last couple of days”—but Nancy’s updates painted a more fraught picture. “He is despondent and crying a lot and just can’t continue. . . . I have been trying to get him to see you and he refuses and every time I’ve brought the subject up it just makes him worse,” she wrote. Nancy surmised that Adam resented Peter’s warning about the heavy course load.
Peter was frustrated but felt that he couldn’t show up at the house in Newtown to force an encounter. “It would have been a fight, the last thing I’d want to be doing. Jesus. . . . If I had gone there unannounced and just, ‘I want to see Adam.’ ‘Why are you doing this?’ Adam would be all bent about me.” Later, Peter remarked, “If I said I’m coming, she’d say, ‘No, there’s no reason for that.’ I mean, she controlled the situation.” Peter tried to remain conciliatory, and never introduced Adam to Shelley, suspecting that it would be more than he could handle. (He did introduce her to Ryan, who had moved to New Jersey after graduating college.) He considered hiring a private investigator “to try to figure out where he was going, so I could bump into him.” If he had, he might have discovered that Adam went regularly to a local movie house to play a game called Dance Dance Revolution, spending up to ten hours at a stretch listening to music and trying to keep up with complex dance moves on an illuminated platform. He was still doing so a month before the shootings.
I wondered how Peter had felt through this period. “Sad,” he said. “I was hurt. I never expected that I would never talk to him again. I thought it was a matter of when.” He asked, “How much do you accommodate the demands and how much do you not? Nancy tended to, as did I.” Peter added, “But I think he saw that he could control her more than he could control me.” Adam had also cut off communication with Ryan, whom he last saw two Christmases before the shootings. According to Peter, Ryan reached out several times, but Adam never responded. Peter and Shelley now suspect that Adam deliberately shut them out to hide his psychological decay. Peter said, “I didn’t understand that Adam was drifting away.”
By 2011, Nancy’s messages had grown terse. Peter attributed this to his remarriage rather than to a change in Adam’s condition. That October, a little more than a year before the shootings, she related that Adam “has been doing very well and has become quite independent over the last year. He is starting to talk about going back to school which would be nice.” But the state’s attorney’s report notes that people who worked on the property couldn’t enter the house and were warned never even to ring the doorbell.
In early 2012, Nancy said that Adam had agreed to see Peter in the spring, but nothing came of it. Nine months later, Peter protested that Adam never even acknowledged his e-mails. Nancy wrote, “I will talk to him about that but I don’t want to harass him. He has had a bad summer and actually stopped going out.” She said that his car had sat unused for so long that its battery was dead. She played down the significance of Adam’s failure to answer his father’s e-mails: “He stopped emailing me a year ago or so, but I assumed it was because he actually started talking to me more.” However, the state’s attorney’s report suggests that Nancy’s account was misleading: Adam had stopped speaking to his mother and communicated only through e-mail. “It bothers me that she was telling me he doesn’t use e-mail at the same time she was e-mailing him,” Peter told me. He thinks Nancy’s pride prevented her from asking for help. “She wanted everyone to think everything was O.K.”
It seems like his parents really did drop the ball here. They left his illness untreated and his mother kept an arsenal in the house despite knowing her child had untreated mental illnesses. That's the least responsible parenting I've ever heard of.
I'll admit that within all of this I can't help but wonder if there was a financial aspect to the lack of treatment as well. Not that it's excusable, but I wonder if their insurance company denied treatment and they decided that if the insurance company felt it was unnecessary it really was (which is bullshit, but these people haven't shown the highest intellect). And proper treatment for him would have bankrupt just about anyone if insurance denied it, even those who are well off. ****NOT THAT THAT'S AN EXCUSE**** But I would be very curious to see if the insurance company denied payment on stuff and that deterred them from taking it further.
She got $289,000 in alimony in 2012. I don't think money was the issue - unless she spent it all on guns, which it appears she did.
It seems like his parents really did drop the ball here. They left his illness untreated and his mother kept an arsenal in the house despite knowing her child had untreated mental illnesses. That's the least responsible parenting I've ever heard of.
I'll admit that within all of this I can't help but wonder if there was a financial aspect to the lack of treatment as well. Not that it's excusable, but I wonder if their insurance company denied treatment and they decided that if the insurance company felt it was unnecessary it really was (which is bullshit, but these people haven't shown the highest intellect). And proper treatment for him would have bankrupt just about anyone if insurance denied it, even those who are well off. ****NOT THAT THAT'S AN EXCUSE**** But I would be very curious to see if the insurance company denied payment on stuff and that deterred them from taking it further.
She got $289,000 in alimony in 2012. I don't think money was the issue - unless she spent it all on guns, which it appears she did.
Would even that large a sum have covered the cost of the level of treatment he needed though? I mean, that's a huge amount of money without a doubt, but it sounds like he needed intensive inpatient treatment, which might well cost more than $300K a year.
Would even that large a sum have covered the cost of the level of treatment he needed though? I mean, that's a huge amount of money without a doubt, but it sounds like he needed intensive inpatient treatment, which might well cost more than $300K a year.
I think the issue was his refusal of treatment and denial of his conditions per the New Yorker article
Would even that large a sum have covered the cost of the level of treatment he needed though? I mean, that's a huge amount of money without a doubt, but it sounds like he needed intensive inpatient treatment, which might well cost more than $300K a year.
I think the issue was his refusal of treatment and denial of his conditions per the New Yorker article
Fair enough. I can't imagine he would have been honest with himself or others about how bad he was.
Yet again I go back to saying that his mother bears a lot of the responsibility because she had all those weapons in the home.
This was clearly a perfect storm. I was surprised how careful the authors of the report were to not ascribe blame.
As the parent of a son who was born a year after Adam and who shares 2 of the same dxs, Aspergers and GAD, I can attest to the difficulty of advocating for care and services for a dx that wasn't in the DSM when he was born. (Aspergers wasn't in the DSM-IV until 1994) 14 years ago when my child was identified, there was few medical or educational professionals who were familiar with the best practices for such a child. I was lucky to have landed with 2 phenomenal professionals who got it and helped me avoid the natural urge to over-accommodate.
When my son was first dxd, in 1999, there were 2 books on Aspergers- Atwood's slim Aspergers Syndrome and Uta Frith's translation of Hans Aspergers' papers.
ringstrue The Yale Child Developmental Clinic was a second opinion; Adam Lanza already had an established relationship with a local psychiatrist. It wasn't as if he wasn't in the care of a board certified medical specialist.
I think the point is that if this kid hadn't been rich, the school would have been like "no you need to do something, just keeping him home is unacceptable." But because these parents were rich and educated the school took their word for it that they were taking care of everything.
So back to "since you're poor, you obviously suck at decision making and society gets to make calls for you" but rich people get a pass? Ugh.
Despite the fact that it seems obvious that they were NOT taking care of everything.
This whole situation is so frustrating. But I'm most upset that this will give the NRA more ammunition (pun intended).
It's more (I think) that if you are rich you have the option to go 'homebound'/homeschool so can avoid the issue. If you are poor and have to work you don't exactly have the same option to just keep your kid at home and avoid public school.
There is also an element that school service are frequently under serving kids with IEPs so families with money have the ability to use private providers, or use private specialized schools so P.S. system is more likely to say 'thank God that's no longer our problem' then to make sure the kid is getting services.
Personally, we are one of those families, DD will be pulled from P.S. next year and put in a 5 day a week ABA based preschool for a year because she will get all the services she needs in one place at the frequency she needs unlike the school system.
Post by AllieHound on Nov 22, 2014 18:18:54 GMT -5
The father bailed, no doubt, so I'm pissed at him. He has an obligation to his son that he failed at, and that is inexcusable. I know all of the reports suggest that Nancy was keeping the severity of Adam's illness hidden, but a father doesn't just go AWOL, and his presence might have helped to keep this from happening.
The brother bailed, too, so I'm a bit pissed at him, but lord knows what kind if shit he dealt with in that house, so OK.
I'm really pissed at Adam, but I understand he was very, very ill. I wish wholeheartedly that he had received the help he needed, or at least that he had stayed in his own home that day, and he obviously is in charge if his own actions.
And I have no doubts that Nancy's life was complete hell, and that she was probably wishing she could bail, too. So I have some compassion for her.
But she bought the guns. And everything I've read about Adam leads me to believe that he didn't posses the skills needed to acquire those weapons in his own. And without those weapons, this wouldn't have happened, at least not on the same scale. So, yes, I think Nancy bears the brunt of the blame.
I do wonder if she just gave up on treating him. A single mom of a child with severe needs would almost certainly have had needs of her own that weren't being treated.
agreed, she could have had her own level of crazy that wasn't being dealt with, which also could complicate the opinions of "why didn't the dad do something?!!"
At my job, we see so many of these kids that are dealing with issues of mental illness and the pathology present in one or both parents clearly plays into the child's illness. And if the parents are divorced or don't have an amicable relationship (even if still married), it's a whole separate issue that compounds and sometimes overshadows the child's issues.
The father bailed, no doubt, so I'm pissed at him. He has an obligation to his son that he failed at, and that is inexcusable. I know all of the reports suggest that Nancy was keeping the severity of Adam's illness hidden, but a father doesn't just go AWOL, and his presence might have helped to keep this from happening.
The brother bailed, too, so I'm a bit pissed at him, but lord knows what kind if shit he dealt with in that house, so OK.
I'm really pissed at Adam, but I understand he was very, very ill. I wish wholeheartedly that he had received the help he needed, or at least that he had stayed in his own home that day, and he obviously is in charge if his own actions.
And I have no doubts that Nancy's life was complete hell, and that she was probably wishing she could bail, too. So I have some compassion for her.
But she bought the guns. And everything I've read about Adam leads me to believe that he didn't posses the skills needed to acquire those weapons in his own. And without those weapons, this wouldn't have happened, at least not on the same scale. So, yes, I think Nancy bears the brunt of the blame.
A mom can never walk away from her kid, especially a sick kid, but a dad always can. Again if roles were reversed society would parade around her head on a stake. But this dad can send a few emails and hope all is okay and we generally shrug. I think for the most part he abdicated his parental responsibilities to his ex wife because he didn't want to deal or couldn't deal. Guess what? She clearly couldn't deal either. And now a bunch of babies are dead. So yeah. I'm mad at the dad.
Post by hopecounts on Nov 22, 2014 18:27:45 GMT -5
I will also say it can be hard to get two married parents of a kid with ASD/Mental Health Issues to agree on treatment and pull together add in what sounds like a less then amicable divorce and I am not surprised that nothing was done.
I'll be honest here and fully admit if it wasn't for me driving the train there is no way DD would be getting what she is getting. DH hasn't made the effort to educate himself or learn the ropes. Part of that is I am a SAHM so it's largely my job, but part of it is he is still in the process of coming to terms with her diagnosis. It's ok because in our situation I am able to just do what needs to be done and fight him over the cost later.
If the positions were flipped? Not so much too much of it depends on my running her around and if I wasn't willing there would only be so much he could do.