Yesterday on my Virgin flight from NYC back to LA for the holidays, I had CNN running on my screen and through my headphones as I read, as a sort of white-noise to block out the rest of the plane's sounds. For the 8 hours I was on that flight, CNN was focused on Newtown, CT - on the 20 murders of those 6-7 year old children while they were in school and the 6 adults who died along with them at the hands of a single gunman. A 20 year old Adam Lanza. Of course, this incident coming so soon after the Oregon shopping mall shooting steered the conversation back to gun control - many victims and their family members calling out our right to bear arms.
Amid this conversation, I kept thinking about something else, though. The fact that reporters repeatedly stated that Adam Lanza had autism. I personally don't know anyone or am close to anyone with autism, but I for some reason bristled at the implications that the news was making on the correlation between autism and violence - and violence of this magnitude. Like I said, I don't know anyone with autism, but this just didn't seem fair at all.
Then, I came across the blog post "I am Adam Lanza's mother", and I was so overwhelmed by her story and the comments of other readers who had seemingly suffered so quietly all this time with family members of their own who had mental illnesses that manifested in unpredictable and intensely violent outbursts.
This story really made me think about how few resources there are for people with mental illness(es) and their families - and how mental health facilities and prison have become conflated. (This was also coming after the 3-strikes law in California was reformed with Proposition 36. The 3-strikes law states that a 3rd offense - ranging from petty theft and drug possession to murder - will result in the same severe punishment of 25 to life - "In other words, these were discarded people who could be made to bear the brunt of this brutal law without risk of public backlash". Proposition 36 calls for life sentences only when the third offense is "serious or violent".)
Through reading the thousands of comments on that one blog post, I came across another link shared by a redditor, this one about a father and his family's experience with his daughter Jan(n)i who has childhood onset schizophrenia. This one made me realize how on top of the lack of resources for mental illness, our society has so easily and without question continued this medieval conflation of mental illness with evil.
I know I'm just scratching the surface here, but I just wanted to acknowledge that I know I complain a lot about the crazies in NYC, but maybe it's not something that should be dismissed with so little thought or care beyond disgust or discomfort. Because they aren't just the scum of society after all, they could be our kids.
-Stacy
