We do keep seeing situations where parents are having to care for their mentally disabled offspring because there are no other options for them. While the idea of the government forcibly institutionalizing people is abhorrent to me, it would be very helpful if family members had some options.

How many mentally ill people are in prison now because the institutional caregiving option was not available to their families? Thank you again, ACLU.

Bad link.

Link has been repaired.

An amazing story. Plus, the comments are equally amazing. Highly recommend reading it all.

My heart weeps for this woman, and every parent of a child so afflicted. Every day must be a walk through hell with no end in sight. Regular teenagers are trying enough.
I´m sure more facts will come out, but I am curious why Adam Lanza was able to access his mother´s weapons. Did he break them out of a locked container or was she in a state of denial over her son´s condition and they were unlocked? Or did she really not think it was as bad as it was?
Regardless, we should not lose sight of who pulled the trigger. That is where the blame lies.

I saw this on my FB page and it sent chills down my spine. Thank you Lucianne and staff for posting it. It´s not about the gun control question. It´s about the state of mind of Adam Lanza and so many like him.

Read what this mom says about what she did with the knives. Why was Adam Lanza allowed anywhere near a gun?

This is one of the most important pieces that you will read. Trust me when I say that multitudes of families are struggling to deal with these situations, and law-enforcement/criminal justice resources are being depleted with no visible improvement. The jails have become the new "mental hospitals", minus the needed level of care, increased violence, and a revolving door that spins like a vortex.

My daughter teaches special Ed In an elementary school. There are many behavioral problem children there. She has ducked chairs being hurled across the room, she can put a child in a restraining hold, she knows self defense moves. And she´s dealing with 1st, 2nd and 3rd graders! I keep thinking how do people handle the older, bigger ones? And how do the families cope? Why won´t America deal with mental disease? Thanks, lawyers and politicians, for that.

Our former mental health system was broken up because liberal groups said that people should not be locked up if they have not committed a crime. There was talk about having them, instead, in homes in normal communities where they could get treatment but be free to go and come as they please. You want that next door to your house? It never happened. A lot of this is because of the stigma attached to any brain behavior problems. Once you understand when the brain is haywire, you know that they must be confined for our safety and theirs. They are suicidal. Of course you can take guns away from the law-abiding people, and carry all your knives in a container wherever you go. And take karate lessons to protect yourself from your full-grown adult son. Lock-down mental facilities are the only way to go, but gun control is easier and cheaper.

A must read on several levels. From her cry, along with FNC´s Keith Ablow and others, for mental health system reform to her attempt to walk the "fine line" in dealing with a son whom she loves but who needs the right kind of help, this is a most moving piece. Prayers and sympathy go to her and all in her situation.

Add to that the media´s obsessive coverage of these tragedies, enabling the shooters to have the moment in the sun that they seek, and our corrupt legal system that shields them before their final act-out, and the problem grows worse. Then there is our age of adulthood that shuts down parental authority at age 18 and inhibits intervention in cases like these and others like "simple" substance abuse. Much of what help exists for parents ends at age 18. Many of these incidents occur in the early 20´s. Coincidence? I think not.

We have much to think about. Let´s keep it in perspective, however. We have a Republic heading towards collapse with a defacto Dictator already in place.

I see that someone in the comments at the article blamed Ronald Reagan for closing mental hospitals in California. Closing the mental hospitals was a movement started by liberals in the 1960, under the influence of psychiatrists like R.D. Laing who believed there was no such thing as mental illness, only different behavior. Ken Kesey was also influential with "One Flew Over the Cuckoo´s Nest," which had a similar message, with the additional idea that the hospitals were places of mistreatment. The hospitals were closed in every state; it was federal policy, and community mental health centers were set up in their place. Somehow it was believed that mentally ill people could be placed into the community and line up for meds once a week and they would be just fine.

The results have been with us for decades: lost, mumbling homeless people on the streets; halfway houses making previously decent neighborhoods into dangerous slums; psychotics harassing people at the minimum or as in this case mass-killing them; families in despair over their mentally ill children. Thanks, liberals. And don´t expect this to get any better under Obamacare.

I have personally lived this mother´s story. She isn´t alone. Adam Lanza´s mother wasn´t alone. The parents who live this are some of the hardest working, most diligent parents in America.

The biggest difference in this story and the story of Adam Lanza´s mother is that this woman has a 13 year old. She is permitted by law to make decisions for him. By the time her son is age 16 (14 in some states), she can sign him into a psychiatric hospital, but he can legally sign himself back out immediately. And if he does anything to harm others once he signs himself out, she is legally responsible - after all, he is under the age of 18! This poor mom hasn´t learned that idiocy of our laws just yet.

Once he turns age 18, she can legally do no more than a stranger can. Even if she gets guardianship over him...her rights under guardianship don´t extent to treatment for psychiatric issues. Another idiocy of our laws. With guardianship she can make the decision to hospitalize him for a hernia - but not for psychosis. Without his permission, only a judge can ordered him held in a mental hospital - and then, typically for no more than 72 hours.

I am lucky. At age 20, my loved one could have been Adam. Fortunately, mine is now considerably older than 20 and, with age, the symptoms have not been nearly so severe.

I read this blog post earlier this morning. I thought some of the comments posted below it were also very odd. I would hope one thing we can all agree on is that mentally ill individuals do not need to have access to fire arms.

Thank you for posting this. It is haunting.

This is an excellent piece -- thank you Ms Lucianne and staff for giving the ok for posting.

Here is a link to another excellent piece, this one from the NYTimes -- there are a lot of seriously disturbed children out there:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/magazine/can-you-call-a-9-year-old-a-psychopath.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

#9, they are living next door to you right now. They are living with their parents until their parents die or can no longer care for them. Why? Because the disability community has convinced the Feds that full ´inclusion´ is the only acceptable form of housing. That means group homes may not have more than 6 residents (in some states, no more than 4). That means that an organization can´t build housing for 12 people with disabilities next to one another; they have to be spread out in the community. Many can´t drive, so they are forced to walk.

One young adult I knew was in a group home where the manager simply dumped all the medicine bottles on the kitchen table twice a day. Residents were expected to find their own and take it.

There are many options short of the institutions of yore with hundreds of patients...but federal government rules mean that those options cannot get financing. Similarly, patients who choose to move into something the government doesn´t approve of may lose their disability services.

No, they don´t all need to be locked up. But the rules that work well for the blind or those in wheelchairs are not always the rules that need to be in place for those with psychiatric or developmental disorders.

I have dealt with the mentally ill and their families in law enforcement. The lack of options are truly heartbreaking. From individuals being conned into doing things by their peers to parents begging for help, there are no resources in place for them.

The comments after the article can be disturbing because many show the complete lack of awareness of the issue. Unless and until you have lived it or dealt with it, you have no right commenting on the parenting, with the only exception being that if these issues exist in your home, there should be no guns, imho.

These societal issues need to be addressed. There are no easy solutions. However, until we get off the anti-gun agenda, the underlying problems will never be fixed.

My heart goes out to all of the families that tragically have to deal with these issues on a daily basis as well as to the families of their victims when things go horribly wrong.

I haven´t read but the first paragraph. Because as a sibling of two paranoid schizophrenics I could have written it. The ages beteen the two are relevant as Sheila was maybe 30 years older than John. Due to that she received "better" mental health care than he did.If by that you mean isolation, shock treatments and any new treatent that they could throw at her. I became her guardian after my mothers death and she was "lucky enough" to be severely chronically schizophrenic at at time when medications were only just coming into vogue. As a result when deinstitutionalization happened she was eventually placed in a nursing home as unable to care for herself. By the time John became ill -some 20 years later-- the wonderful ACLU stepped in to insure that the insane remain insane. I still remember the harrowing rides to the hospital for my mother with Sheila trying to jump out of the car... The dr E Fuller Torrey has written extensivly about the neglect of the mentally ill of which many are the homeless. As he says if they had cancer or brain tumors would they still be allowed to wander around without any medical help? So if you want to thank someone most responsble fo this chaos blame the ACLU.

#15, the family has choices at age 18 or 21 - none of them good choices. Permit the adult child to continue living at home, while protecting yourself and others the best you can, knowing every day that your efforts may not be enough. Or wash your hands of the situation and leave your adult child living on the streets - a choice that some mental health professionals actually suggest, because it may be the fastest door to obtaining services! Or seek out a group home, but these are few and far between and the qualify of services is often very poor.

Thank you for posting this article. There are really no options, once they turn 18. You hear things like, "How old are they? Sorry, we can´t help you, they are over 18, they have ask for themselves." You try your best, and then eventually have to step back. They either make it or you helplessly watch them fall. God help all who have to walk this path.

Thank your #17 for your comment. I remember when this happened & arguing with a very liberal teacher when a story came out about what some were doing in public. She said they had ´rights.´ I asked her if she would be happy about her mother´s defecating at the entrance of a store, it was her ´right´ and that shut her up--well, for the moment. Sadly, personally, I have dealt with someone´s brain disorder on a different plane, but it did involve the police, wrestling and handcuffs, finally involuntary commitment to a locked down mental facility, tragic no matter the cause.

In the article the author states that we need to have a national dialogue. If only we could. We had a national dialogue some years ago and the liberals won. Insane asylmns were closed and the insane turned loose and expected to take their medicine faithfully. First, they are not responsible enough to do that and second, even those who want to do so sooner or later give the medicine up vecause of the swide effects. The great liberal experiment has failed.

Despite that failure we cannot have this conversation again. Liberals never admit a mistake. The subject is closed. They won.

" ... Liberals never admit a mistake. The subject is closed. They won... "

And we all lose.

Liberalism is a mental disorder.

As good as this article is, I must totally disagree with the premise, "I am Adam Lanza´s Mom". Not just literally. I haven´t read anything yet about a relationship like this between Adam and his mother. In fact, the amount of misleading information, "suffered from Asperger´s, ticking time bomb, always had pens in his pocket, kept to himself, different," is very dismaying. There are millions of kids out there who fit this profile and have never, and will never, go crazy like Adam did.
I have a lot more thoughts on this incident but I am going to wait for the real information to come out.
The mother´s issues in this article are very real for her and I will pray for her.

#24..True...but they are in charge, God help us all the inmates are running the assylum.

#25: I agree. There´s a lot of speculation about the Lanza´s that doesn´t have any evidence.

Speaking of mental problems: Sen. Dianne Feinstein has threatened to introduce ´assault weapons ban´ legislation in the next US Congress. Is the good Senator aware that the real problem is mental illness? Is she also aware that there are millions of guns in the hands of US citizens, any one of which, when stolen can be used by a maniac to perform the same criminal that Lanza did in CT?

While I don´t think one parent or another is the perfect solution to addressing what is clearly some kind of brain disorder, I notice that there´s no mention of the boy´s father anywhere in this article. Not that the mere presence of another parent will "shape him up" and "give him the swift kick he needs", because this boy has severe mental health problems. However, a father would help calm and restrain him and model appropriate behavior for him.

Families are stronger when two parents rear the children. The need for two parents is even more critical when a child in the family suffers from a disability.

Familiarity with the Community Mental Health Centers Act of 1963 is essential for anyone trying to understand the terrible dilemma of this mother and countless parents like her. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Mental_Health_Act provides a concise summary.

It is not at all clear that the Sandy Hook killer presented the obvious danger to others of Liza Long´s mentally disturbed son, or that lack of resources or treatment or irrational legal constraints on involuntary hospitalization would have prevented the Sandy Hook massacre - but that there are many, many families facing problems very much like Liza Long is undeniable. And though it becomes tedious to blame liberals for everything that is wrong in society, they must bear a large load of responsibility for the 1963 legislation that had the unintended consequence of converting the nation´s penal system into its largest and most effective mental health provider for the gravely mentally ill.

I couln´t help but to see a connection. Not between this article and the recent shooting, but between the recent shooting, this article, and all the street shootings in Chicago.

Lanza and this woman´s son were both brought up by caring parents who tried to get them help. But what of those who aren´t brought up at all? What happens to mentally ill or damaaged children on the south side of Chicago with mothers who can´t be bothered to feed them, let alone get them mental health treatment? Does their lack of control result in their becoming street murderers at age 12? Gang enforcers at age 14?

It´s easy to refer to the teenagers killing people in the ghetto as "animals," but how do we know we aren´t looking at the very same issue? Why is one a moral issue, and the other a mental health issue?

Thank you, LcomStaff for fixing the link. #12, we lived this too. From mid-teens to mid-20´s was hell on earth for us. He´s 34 now and out on his own. Can´t keep a job because he can´t stay on his meds. Gets SSDI, food stamps, Medicaid and whatever he can scrounge doing day work. Sees a counselor once a month, gets a shot of something and a script for Wellbutrin, Abilify, Depakote or whatnot. He tells us he´s Bipolar, sound proud of it. Maybe that´s the best one in the DSM-IV. He may or may not fill the script depending whether or not he needs the co-pay money for beer or smokes.
There´s nothing I can do for him, nothing that will do any good, that is.

#29, intact families have these issues as well. It isn´t an issue of modelling - mine had an intact family and years of therapy. If it were as easy as the child watching the role model of another, these problems wouldn´t exist. Parents have given up careers to be available both to the child and to take the child to appointment after appointment, or to arrange for many hours of therapy to come into the home. Families have mortgaged their homes, mortgaged their futures, to pay for all the help they could get for their children...and it still isn´t enough.

#25, I have read that Adam Lanza´s mother worked with the school district until she finally pulled him out to homeschool him in high school. She also gave up being a full-time teacher and switched to substitute teaching so she would have the flexibility to deal with him.

All of this is very common in this population. Few school districts have the resources or the motivation to deal with these complex cases. Many parents do choose to homeschool by the high school years. It is a more effective solution than continuing to fight the school districts for services. As someone who has dealt with this problem, these facts alone tell me that Adam´s mother was very aware of his challenges and very involved.

To what Poster#11 said: In the late 1980´s this movement landed in Tennessee. It was under a Developing Application of "Patient´s Rights´. The State started closing down residential Mental Health Facilities.Most, admittedly, were older and lacking in maintenance dollars. As D.H.S. closed facilities and moed to set up ´12 Step Programs´ not for the Menlally Handicapped, but to capture dollars for Drug Rehabilitation. They operated a program to get the long term mentally ill patients back to their families. They would literally call up a family and tell them they were releasing their family member and that that patient would arrive at a location near their home of record by bus, at a specific time. If they were met at the Bus Station, they became the Family´s problem, if they were not met by their family, they became, usually a problem for the local Police Dept. At any rate the Patient was no longer a problem for Tn. D.H.S.
I know this was how my family was threatened ( and Threatened after each visit to the Hospital to visit or daughter; My adopted daughter was hospitalized by a Court Order, because we were unable to continue, due to a lack of assets and withdrawal of my insurance´s Mental Health Benefits, to care for her in home. Several times we had awakened in our dark bedroom to find our 17 year old standing along side our bed holding a butcher knife. We had to go to Juvenile Court and formally surrender to the State our Parental Rights, so she could be hospitalized in a State Hospital and receive the 24 hr. Custodial Care she needed.

I know someone with the exact same problem - the son exhibited signs from an extremely early age. He is highly intelligent, threatened his mother, siblings and pets- she had to hide the knives and had trouble keeping babysitters. She took him to doctor after doctor and not until he got to UCLA where he was "washed" of the meds he was on that weren´t working and put on something else has he exhibited stable behavior. However, he has not yet reached puberty.

The mother told me that she was afraid someday he would be a "Columbine kid". She´s having a hard time in the last few days - I´m sure it´s a constant worry about the meds continuing to work.

They used to have facilities (lock down) for these kids. I worked at one. Ages 12 and up. Boys and girls. The kids were very difficult to manage ... and very dangerous. Truly, no one knew what to do with them. It was all experimental. Nothing worked. I didn´t follow their progression and so can´t say what became of them. Michael would have fit right in with the group. I think these facilities were closed - funding issues. They were useful. The kids had to have a record but then were opted in to the facilities when faced with long term incarceration. The woman is right she needs help.

#33,

I hope I didn´t imply that two parents would solve the problem of mental illness, because nobody can do that. However, each parent would help the other to cope. They´d be able to take turns giving attention to other family members and family matters. That isn´t much, and it doesn´t mean that there won´t be tremendous sacrifices in the family as a whole.

There´s no easy, pat solution to any of this. I´m just glad I´m not reading any posts that claim kids like Adam and Michael will be magically cured by a good whuppin´.

#31, that is a good question. I would answer in part that the Chicago issue is one where violence has been glorified, where the perpetrators actually look up to those who approve of violence.

On the other hand, in most of these mental health questions, the person likely does not like violence, does not respect perpetrators of violence. It is a psychotic break, a disconnect from reality.

Teachers and parents of mentally ill children are painfully aware of something called mainstreaming. It is the educational equivalent of the 1963 Community Mental Health Centers Act - and it is, as usual, the brain child of the liberal establishment.

The concept is simple. It consists of pretending that seriously disturbed children are not THAT bad, and placing them in regular classrooms with their "peers." This of course means denying them the specialized attention and care that they need.

Those familiar with such mainstreaming know that it can result in ludicrous, almost unimaginable classroom situations. I have always wondered why an expose´ of this pernicious practice has never been done.

The reason liberal fantasy ideology is called fantasy ideology is that it is a determined, indeed almost insane attempt to force reality to conform to the wishful thinking of liberals. The principal thing is for the liberal to feel good. If reality presumes to intrude and object, so much the worse for reality. If not for the negative and sometimes tragic results of this make-believe approach to life, it would be hilarious.

I am an OBGYN, who delivered a baby in our town similar to Newtown two years ago. Two weeks after she and her husband went home with their newborn, her young brother with Asberger´s shot his mother and two sisters, killing my patient, the mother of the two week old. The other two survived. Shocked our community.

Tom Goggin, MD
Athens, GA

This is a very longstanding problem, going back to the 1970´s and beyond.

In the mid-´70´s I went to a social occasion at a house in a Boston suburb.

The young gents who were throwing the party and co-renting the house we were at told the story...
of the prior tragic tenants.

The statue in the yard was made by the mentally ill son. It was weird.

When the son got out of a mental hospital, he came home and slaughtered his parents.
In the bedroom you could see splots of blood on the ceiling.

Macabre but true tale.
Gotta run, sorry.

Ronald Reagan was a great man, but he was not perfect. His closing of the state mental hospitals was a mistake. What the Brits would call "a blot on his copybook". His doing it influenced other states to do it.

Regardless of what we think of RR - and I was a supporter and an admirer - this was his mistake and we are still living with it across the country.

In Columbia, SC there is a gentleman called The Cardinal. He dresses in what appears to be a Cardinal´s ?vestments. He is a patient of Cola Area Mental Health.

The administrators and health officals there are dedicated. They do an excellent job given the funds, facilities and laws.

If a teenager can be persuaded to sign up with CAMH then if a meltdown occurs, CAMH can and will commit the patient IF there is room at a facility and will help with costs if not provide medication. (This is once private ins. and private funds are exhausted.)

There are also many citizens that give patients jobs.

The key is always the willingness of the patient to take meds and understand the situation. Many are lucid enough to do this. Unfortunately many are lucid enough, but do not wish to change their behavior. And many are too ill. It is a mistake to lump mental illness and degress of it into one category.

God bless and help every single soul touched by this.

As the comment above says, America is inundated with all sorts of mentally ill people. Many are on their own without adequate mental health treatment and are protected by the medical privacy laws.

While only a small percentage may be very dangerous, often because of the medical privacy laws mental health professionals and law enforcement have little or no information sharing protocols regarding mental cases who may be very dangerous, until after serious crime is committed when it is too late.

Remember mentally ill people can vote in the USA, and you can safely bet that most all who do vote cast ballots for liberal Democrats. For that reason liberal Democrats shy away from ever blaming a obviously mentally ill perpetrator when a mass shooting occurs. Instead they blame conservative Republicans citing some non-germane statement or comment taken completely out of context, and of course blame guns which is a pretty safe bet for liberal Democrat politicians because guns can´t vote.

Look up deinstitutionalization to understand why emptying mental hospitals was such a seductive idea, especially to liberals who thought they were doing very sick people a favor. New drugs of the day were supposed to revolutionize treatment. Unfortunately, patients were not nearly as compliant about taking those medications once they were released. The national movement to shut down mental hospitals began long before Ronald Reagan was governor.

My husband´s and my reaction to this sad situation was one and the same "And his father is.... where exactly?"

While I understand that true mental illness effects people from intact and broken homes and has a multitude of contributing factors some of which no one not even the patient has any control over, I don´t think that simply passing over with a wave of a hand the trauma of divorce and then the resultant single parents homes on the psyche of developing children is particularly honest. I am not trying to be callous, just realistic. The mom in this blog is an admitted single mother of 4 children. This is too much for any one person to handle and fathers are needed by their sons, this is a fact that has been shoved out of sight by the feminist brigade for so long. How many of these mentally ill children have been dragged through the horror of divorce or have never had 2 loving committed parents active in their lives? If that isn´t a mental health minefield, I don´t know what is.

I am not saying that divorce is a cause of mental illness but I would assume a stressor of that magnitude on a vulnerable developing brain, personality, and character could cause a great many problems. Mix in some brain chemistry altering medications, the long term effects could be horrific.

And yes, I have family experience with teenage "mental illness" that in the end turned out to NOT be mental illness. My family member will forever be scarred with the stigma and record of institutionalized "mental illness" due to his selfish, thoughtless, self absorbed, controlling mother deciding to use this abusive system to absolve herself of the responsibility of parenting.

This could have been written by me twenty years ago. I was going through divorce and my thirteen year old son was acting out as a result. I heard the same thing from law enforcement, "no help unless he breaks the law." He was out of control, but he was not mentally ill, just hurt and angry.
We all survived. For many years I felt I had been through WWIII as a parent.
Her blog brought me back to the pain and fear of that time, and my son was not mentally ill, but he was stronger than I and out of control.

But it seems like the United States is using prison as the solution of choice for mentally ill people.

I know this is true from personal experience. I know this is true from a close friend who works in the prison system.

People with mental illness rarely did anything to deserve the disease that torments them. This is not true with many diseases that were contracted from nothing more than poor choices and poor morals. And yet, people with those diseases, many of the STDs, are granted superior rights and privileges under the law.

As a para who worked in special ed for many years, I ould tell the woman that each day she drops Michael off at school costs all the other kids in his class the chance to learn in a calm and safe evironment. The school day becomes a drama on steroids. Some kids need to be institutionalized. Sorry.

There is no easy answer concerning patients´ rights and privacy vs. locking these people up. I personally know several nurses whose lives were ruined by mentally ill patients attacking them. Their careers were ended, and they lived their remaining years with considerable chronic pain. I believe that each person in jail should be safe, in their own personal cell, and stay there all day. Maybe we should have bare bones prisons for the truly criminal,(since they deserve punishment, after all) and nicer and somewhat luxurious jails for the super crazy people that are violent.

All state hospitals were closed as per federal law, #11? I wonder how I was allowed to commit adults to Eastern State Hospital in Washington and later to Idaho State Hospital. Maybe I hallucinated it. Overly generalized comments about patients lining up for medications and then being forgotten about are hyperbole at best and ignorance at worst. That is NOT what good community mental health centers do. There have been many successful programs for the chronically mentally ill in which case managers do normalization behaviors out in the community with patients in order to reinforce community appropriate behaviors and see when medications were not being taken or the side-effects were intolerable. People don´t become psychotic or manic in a 0 to 100 manner. There are very clear indicators that are incremental. With the discovery and use of Clozaril and then 3rd generation anti-psychotic (which are also anti-manic and adjunct medications for depression) came into use, side-effects became less and less a problem, making it easier to stay on medications.

Is it true that more people were killed by people wielding baseball bats than by guns? It is easy to say pass gun control laws but that will not protect first graders from someone twice as old given to violence.

This is the situation the liberals have made.

Thank you Mario Cuomo. You turned out the mentaly ill in New York. You and your liberal buddies are responsible for the situation in Newtown Ct. You don´t care about the safety of citizens, just your ego.

Thank you for posting this, Lucianne. We were lucky that my brother was generally easy-going by nature, and even luckier eventually to have managed to find him a good home with others in his situation where he is supervised by people trained to deal with his affliction. But, there was a period there where we were at our wits´ ends. Reading this woman´s account, I can only despair for those who had it so much worse than we, and ours was bad enough to destroy our family.

People who have never lived it think these people are just quirky, or irresponsible, or something, and could be forced to straighten up and fly right with proper parenting or authority. It just isn´t like that at all. They are unable to process reality, and most are no longer capable of functioning in regular society, even with treatment, and hopelessly incapable without it. My brother was captain of his track team, was dating the homecoming queen, and was expected to far outpace his lesser siblings before his first psychotic break. It was not a slow descent, or even arguably part of normal growing pains. It was sudden and severe. Within a year´s time, he had plummeted from the acme of promise to the pit of despair. All that´s left today, 2+ decades later, is essentially a shell which retains some charateristics of my brother as I knew him then. Exactly, in fact, as I knew him then. His personality is still very much that of a 17 year old boy, without any understanding of the world outside his immediate needs and gratification.

The state of mental health care in this country is an abomination. Mental illness is a physical illness, just like any other. The brain has become dysfunctional. The condition cannot be cured at present, and perhaps only prevented in the future. But, it can be managed with appropriate therapy and medication. Some lucky few retain enough contact with reality that they can lead a diminished life of semi-independence. For others, expecting them to adhere to the therapy regimen, assuming they accept it in the first place, and fend for themselves is akin to pushing them out of an airplane and admonishing them to flap their arms and fly. But, their wings have been ravaged, and it is just not physically possible.

It is unjust for a civilized society to push the burden onto the families, who are generally not knowledgable or qualified in any way to deal with the situation, and it is not their fault. This is an equal opportunity affliction - though it is more likely to occur in families with a history, it is not much less likely to strike from out of the blue. It tends to strike males in their late teens to early twenties, and females in their late twenties to early thirties. It could happen to you or someone in your family, dear reader. And, God help you if it does.

#42 Ronald Reagan was implementing a law that was signed by the previous Calif governor, Pat Brown, the present governor´s father. The mental health community and the ACLU types of the 60´s persuaded the public that many people placed in institutions should not be there and that they were being mistreated. I am sure some changes were in order but our society has paid a very heavy price for this overreaction.

Mom leaving three of her registered guns in the home of her mentally disabled son, is as potentially dangerous as any drunk driver
As far the police are concerned, stop attacking peaceful lifetime drug users, save billions and focus on people like this and parents with these frightening problems.
Our government seems to be doing everything wrong and forgetting their simple job of
protection, heading off predectable crimes.
Think about the fascist communist stupidity of enforcing obamaskare with IRS agents, for example. They focus their guns on the plain sick people with broken bones, heart patients, cancer, the lot. Guns attacking the physically sick, doing nothing about the mentally ill.

Our prisons are now full of mentally ill individuals because there are no actions that can be taken until they do harm to others.

#42, how much are you being paid to spread THAT lie? We all know the mental hospitals were closed by the ACLU! LIAR!