What is it like to be faced with the realization that your son stands accused of killing 12 people and wounding 60?
"They are doing as well as they can under the circumstances" said Lisa Damiani, the attorney speaking for the family of James Holmes, the alleged Aurora, CO gunman.
How well could that possibly be?
There are a few parents who can answer that question. One is Susan Klebold, mother of Dylan, one of the two teens who opened fire on classmates at Columbine. In November of 2009, more than ten years after the massacre, she wrote about her experience in an essay for O Magazine titled "I Will Never Know Why."
She wrote:
Those of us who cared for Dylan felt responsible for his death. We thought, "If I had been a better (mother, father, brother, friend, aunt, uncle, cousin), I would have known this was coming." We perceived his actions to be our failure. I tried to identify a pivotal event in his upbringing that could account for his anger. Had I been too strict? Not strict enough? Had I pushed too hard, or not hard enough? In the days before he died, I had hugged him and told him how much I loved him. I held his scratchy face between my palms and told him that he was a wonderful person and that I was proud of him. Had he felt pressured by this? Did he feel that he could not live up to my expectations?
But while there are (thank God) few parents who have watched their children branded as serial killers, there are (tragically) too many who can identify with another kind of parenting hell -- watching your child spiral toward insanity.
It is not clear whether psychiatrists will determine that Holmes was in the grip of mental illness when he fired into the crowd at the cinema after midnight on Friday, but watching him dazed and apparently strongly medicated at his initial hearing, it certainly seems likely. And it is a descent that is familiar to Randi Davenport, author of "The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes" about her 15-year-old son's state of unremitting psychosis.
In an essay for HuffPost Parents she gives a glimpse of that nightmare through a parent's eyes.
She begins:
When my son went crazy, he stalked the halls of the hospital and fired lasers from his eyes. He thrashed in the arms of orderlies whenever anyone came on the unit. He believed that the parents who visited their sick children were FBI profilers, executioners, murderers. When he saw me, he screamed that I was an imposter. He stood at the window and scanned the driveways for white vans, convinced they were filled with shooters who were coming to kill him...If he'd been able to put his hands on a gun, I have no doubt that he would have turned it on someone, if only so he could protect himself.
There will be a lot of talk over the coming months of how James Holmes became who we saw today -- the red haired young man sitting slumped and shackled in a courtroom, looking demonic and pathetic and the same time. There will be those who will wonder, as they did about the Klebolds -- as Susan Klebold did about herself -- if this is his parents' fault. Surely a loved child, from a nurturing home, could not turn out this way.
And there will be those who know otherwise. Who understand first hand that any child can descend into darkness, as surely as they can be gripped by cancer, or felled by a random bullet.
My heart goes out to all the families broken by this tragedy.
There but for the grace of God, genetics, misfiring neurons, and random happenstance, go all of us.
Follow Lisa Belkin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/lisabelkin
Watching your child in fear from the voices and visions of terror that only he can see is probably one of the most heartbreaking thing a parent can go thru.
I cannot imagine, knowing that your child hurt and killed others while in a fit of psychosis. My heart goes out not only to the victims and families of this and other tradgedies, but also for the parents of the ones who have commited them. I am sure that while the world sees a monster, they remember that once, before the illness, was their little boy and they wonder what became of him
Obviously such disturbances can occur also due to genetic weaknesses. Education needs to give students a more holistic experience for full brain development by methods of dissolving the stresses. It might be helpful in education is to introduce meditation such as Transcendental Meditation which has been evidenced to increase cerebral fllod flow (Jevning et al., 1996) as a necessary way to clear out the stresses and allow for the full brain functioning.
Here she writes:
And yes, he'd written a school paper about a man in a black trenchcoat who brutally murders nine students. But we'd never seen that paper. (Although it had alarmed his English teacher enough to bring it to our attention, when we asked to see the paper at a parent-teacher conference, she didn't have it with her. Nor did she describe the contents beyond calling them "disturbing." At the conference—where we discussed many things, including books in the curriculum, Gen X versus Gen Y learners, and the '60s folk song "Four Strong Winds"—we agreed that she would show the paper to Dylan's guidance counselor; if he thought it was a problem, one of them would contact me. I never heard from them.) We didn't see the paper, or Dylan's other writings, until the police showed them to us six months after the tragedy.
Read more: http://www.oprah.com/world/Susan-Klebolds-O-Magazine-Essay-I-Will-Never-Know-Why/4#ixzz21arMgvKa
Not that that's an indicator. It could have simply been dismissed as him having seen one too many horror films.
I heard a brief interview with a psychologist, who was asked if the amount of violence that is displayed in movies, television and games could be attributed to these mass shooting events. She said 'no'. NO? That's hard to believe.
Isn't it time to get back to what we were all born to be - human beings. Not violent animals, or senseless sheep following one fad to the next. Our simple amusements in this time of global crises are fast running out and the reality of reaping what we have sown is setting in.
It's time to take a step back and take a look at how we have lost the ability to communicate with each other - in a way where we work together, see a larger picture that is more than just 'myself'. We need to care for and look after each other.
Society needs an overhaul. www.mutualresponsibility.org
In general, thank you yintwin for your very valuable insights here, and particularly the tip on the www.mutualresponsibility.org website. I agree that they carry the right message for our times and I hope (though I haven't seen yet) a lot of copycats of THAT message!
Mass media in particular has to assume a central role in the transformation. There is no other means to affect humanity except the means of communication. There is no other way to reach every person. His or her views are based not on what they studied in school, but rather on the information that mass media feeds them. . Mass media creates the information field that feeds all humanity. All seven billion are being cooked in this “broth” that fills the Internet, and we see what the result of it is.
People who are can barely get through the day.
This man was a killer. Does he have a personality disorder? Maybe. Did something set him off? Probably.
His actions were deliberate and hateful and it seemed as if it were an act of vengeance, some sort of "getting even" much like Columbine. The killer had become a misanthrope.
I hope a judge and jury will carefully consider the facts when they become available.
I know a couple of schizophrenics who are brilliant and perfectly capable of planning such a crime, btw. Perhaps the schizophrenics you know are heavily medicated?