The "I Am Adam Lanza's Mother" column should be required reading for community leaders trying to understand how a tragedy like the Sandy Hook killings could have happened and how to prevent future massacres. The column is by a mother in Idaho who fears her mentally ill young boy and worries about a treatment system that seems to be pushing him toward violence and incarceration in order to obtain comprehensive mental health care.
It's one of the most succinct, honest tellings of a refrain you've probably heard before -- that the U.S. mental health system is failing many children with sad and sometimes dangerous consequences. Last year, Kathy Swanson detailed the many ways that the mental health system failed her son, Michael, before he eventually stole his parents car, drove to Iowa, and killed two convenience store clerks at random on Nov. 15, 2010.
One of the things that startled me in the Idaho mother's column is the abundance of source material at her disposal.
The Columbine school sheeting. The Aurora theater shooting. The Tucson shooting that killed six and injured a congresswoman. The Virginia Tech shooting.
The mother didn't even need to mention the example of Swanson and the convenience store killings. Or the Red Lake high school shootings in 2005. Or the Omaha mall shootings in 2007. Or the Northern Illinois college campus shootings in 2008. But all of those tragedies also involved young male killers for whom medication and mental health treatment had either been inadequate or had failed.
