The Huffington Post recently featured an article titled “ I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother ” by a woman named Liza Long. In it, she details the often-terrifying experience of raising a young, emotionally troubled son, drawing parallels between her boy and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter Adam Lanza, and calling for a greater focus on the issue of mental health accessibility in the US.
David Frum, columnist for The Daily Beast , wrote a companion piece/rebuttal to Long’s confessional, titled “I Was Adam Lanza.” No, Frum is not admitting a history of mental illness all his own. Rather, he writes that a young person living on the East Coast sent him a letter detailing the experience of living with, and overcoming, mental health issues in one’s life.
Frum writes that the individual behind the letter is now personally stable, a college graduate, and gainfully employed. The essay is an attempt to answer the question that has been on everyone’s mind since Newtown: What goes through the mind of a killer?
“Like her [Liza Long’s] son, I used knives to try and make my threats of violence seem more real. Like her son, I would leap out of our car in the middle of the road just to get away from my mother, over the most trivial of offenses. Like her son, I screamed obscenities at my mother shortly after moments of relative peace. And worse than this poor woman’s son, whose mindset toward his peers we can only guess, I will admit that I fantasized multiple times about taking ordnance to my classmates.”
The author offers a warning, delivered from personal obligation: “Kids like me and Liza Long’s son are not psychotic lost causes. We can be stopped. We can be saved.”
“Parents, I cannot stress this enough: the healing process starts with you. Not the mental health community. Not the police. Not the government. Not the school. You.
“I know it’s hard. I know that we’re asking for the most love when we are least loveable. I can only promise that we – or some of us – will sooner or later understand and recognize the heroism of what you did.”
You can read Part One of the “I Was Adam Lanza” post here . What do you think? Does intervention start at home with the parents?
