The Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings have reignited the discussion of gun violence in America - but that's the easy discussion. It's time to take a good hard look at the heart of the issue and sit down to have a serious talk about about mental illness. (1)
A few days before the Sandy Hook shootings, my eleven year old son, Jason, was refusing to eat breakfast because his cereal bowl was the wrong color.
"I can't eat this," he informed me, his perpetual stubbornness penetrating his every word, "The bowl is blue. It has to be red."
"It's the exact same kind of bowl," I explained to him, "just a different color. The red bowl broke. This is a new one but it's just like it."
"No. It's not right. I can only eat out of the red bowl!" he exclaimed and tossed the full bowl of cereal at my face.
"You will eat out of any bowl," I said, keeping my voice calm, "and you may not throw things. No TV for the next two days. If you don't eat, it'll be longer."
My son is mentall ill. I love him very much - but I am always frightened of what he could do.
A few weeks prior to this, he got ahold of a pair of scissors and threatened to stab me with them because I asked him to put on a clean shirt. His six year old sister and eight year old brother knew what to do: run to the neighbors and dial the police. Jason continued to threaten me until officers arrived, the scissors were wrestled from his hand, and he was ambulanced to the local hospital - a very expensive trip. He wasn't able to get a bed at the mental hospital that night so after recovering in the ER he was sent home with a prescription and a referrel to a psychiatrist. Back at home, I locked up every sharp object in the house in a safe under the kitchen sink.
My son has paranoid child-hood schizophrenia, also known as paranoid early-onset schizophrenia and high functioning autism. It makes him angry. It makes him violent. It makes him scary. It makes him dangerous. That's not all my son is, though. He can also be sweet and smart and amazing and interesting and entertaining and wonderful. He can can be both, either, or neither. And you never know whawt you'll get.
I wanted to tell you my story because I am Adama Lanza's mother. I am Dylan Klebold’s, Eric Harris’s, James Holmes’s, Jared Loughner’s, and Seung-Hui Cho’s mother. And we need to talk about the mental illness, not the guns.
In today's system one of my few remaining options for my son is to file charges and put my son in jail - but I don't want that for him. He doesn't belong there. Unfortunatly, in our country, these days, that's often the only option - the rate of mental illness in prison is five times that of the general public. Our mental hospitals are shut down, though, so what does that leave in the end, other than prison?
We have to do something. But no one wants to send an eleven year old boy to prison. That's not the answer. But then what is? As a nation, we need to have that conversation. We need to talk about mental health in this country.
For me, for my son, for all this country, for all of us.
(2)
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