The toxicology screening for the autopsy takes a while, even when there is no mass shooting, and Connecticut isn’t exactly overstocked with the people and labs that deal with the process.
From what I can tell, the perp wasn’t exactly broadcasting his reasons for these events, and seems to have gone to a lot of trouble to cover up. Paranoia would seem to play a major role in his life, as well as secrecy.
]]>– Badtux the Flabbergasted Penguin
]]>There are a lot of services in this country that come to a screeching halt when teens in trouble have their 18th birthday, including foster care. There is no transition, just a total cut-off of services almost totally without regard to the condition of the individual. Outside of prison, the next largest concentration of people with mental health problems is among the homeless, where, even if they want to take their meds, it is a constant battle not to have them stolen.
The country has lost its soul, and things won’t improve until it is recreated. You make a mental health arrest and you know they will be back on the street in 72 hours. They will have gotten a few good meals, showers, and some rest, but they are dumped back on the street after their meds are readjusted. There is nothing more the facility can do, even if they want to, which many do.
]]>The thing about a 20 year old is that he’s legally an adult — you can’t force him into treatment unless you can convince a judge that he is a threat to himself and others. When you have treatment-resistant mentally ill people, that makes things a mite hard to handle no matter whether you want to help him or not. While the old system of involuntary commitment was way too easy to abuse, this current system simply doesn’t work. You can’t prove that someone is crazy enough to harm himself and others until he actually does it — at which point it’s sorta too late.
And finally, regarding Aspergers, I worked with autistic kids as a special education teacher. This kid was no more an aspie than Bill Clinton is. He was what I’d refer to as a “weird kid” — he likely was suffering from schizophrenia. Those were the hardest clients for us to deal with, because when you’re dealing with someone who is having hallucinations and harboring completely delusional thoughts with no connection to reality, it’s hard to find any set of behavioral constraints that are going to be effective, and finding effective medications can be difficult. And even when you do find an antipsychotic that works to calm the hallucinations and delusions, the microsecond they turn 18… bam, out of the system, and then nobody can force them to take those antipsychotic medications so they don’t.
In other words, it’s not just the fact that the institutions closed. It’s the fact that we now care more about the right of delusional patients to be delusional than we care about treating them and protecting society from them. I blame liberals for that as much as conservatives, because it was liberals who insisted that the mentally ill were merely “mentally different” and “just misunderstood”. Bah, humbug. Spoken like morons who’ve never dealt with mentally ill people. Gah, the stupid, it burns, it burns!
]]>He was probably never formally treated, because his death would dissolve the client/patient bond, and any professional would have revealed something a bit more substantial than the rumors being reported.
I’m wondering if anyone is taking a serious look at his mother. She may have been in denial, and refused to have him treated. That isn’t uncommon in some families. Another alarming trend is the number of misdiagnoses of ADHD that turn out to be bi-polar. The ADHD meds make bi-polar symptoms worse.
There was a definite problem, and it doesn’t appear to have been addressed, even though the family was comfortably in the upper-middle class.
There are a lot of people with Aspergers in IT and engineering. They do their ‘thing’ well, but they don’t get promoted because they don’t deal with other people very successfully. With competent supervision they put out a quality product. I imagine they are also in other technologies and research fields.
There was a mental health facility on the border of my jurisdiction and we encountered the ‘clients’ quite often. It was rare to have a client actually break a law, they were usually victims. We took a report if we could, and took them ‘home’ to explain what happened to the staff, but they were not a ‘concern’ to my department.
The mental health system in this country is broken. They closed the hospitals, but the community-based clinics were never built.
]]>That woman who wrote the viral post about being “Adam Lanza’s Mom” has done just as much damage to autistics as the media has. contrary to her blog name, I like to call her the Antichrist Soccer Mom….
]]>There are reports that the disk drives on the computers at the suspect’s house were removed and physically damaged, which is atypical for these events. There don’t seem to be any notes or documentation left behind.
If NSA ‘accidentally’ collected emails, etc., I wonder if they would share them with the FBI, because that seems to be the best hope for finding out what was going on. I assume they have already subpoenied phone and Internet records. Unless there is something hidden somewhere, it is possible they will never find out why this happened.
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