Parents of man accused of planning shooting call for changes in mental health system
10:09 pm - 12/25/2012
Parents of man accused of planning shooting call for changes in mental health system
Bill and Tricia Lammers sat in the lobby of Citizens Memorial Hospital on Friday, a week after 20 children and six adults were killed at a Connecticut elementary school. Outside, the flag flew at half staff.
The couple has been here before. They have waited for hours as hospital staffers called institutions around the state, trying to find one that had an open bed for their mentally ill son, Blaec, 20. They have waited time and again, five times here and twice in other hospitals, long before November when their son was arrested.
The arrest came after Tricia Lammers told authorities Blaec bought an AR-15 and another semi-automatic from the Bolivar Walmart, the same store where he was found three years ago carrying a butcher knife and a Halloween mask with plans to kill a clerk.
His plans this time, authorities say, were to shoot up a movie theater showing the latest “Twilight” movie. Blaec Lammers is facing felony charges of first-degree assault, making a terrorist threat and armed criminal action. Since then, Tricia Lammers has received phone calls from people who say she’s heroic.
“I’m not a hero,” Tricia Lammers said. “With the events that happened last Friday my heart tells me I did the right thing.
“Our city could be in the news.”
Bill and Tricia Lammers miss their son. He has been at the Polk County Jail for more a month now. They can only see him on Sundays. For 30 minutes. They can’t touch him. He is behind shatterproof glass, and they can only talk to him on the phone in the visiting room. They mourn him as if — in a way — he is dead to them.
“I’m a mom,” Tricia Lammers said. “It’s the holidays. I don’t have my child.”
The couple moved to Bolivar with their two children in 2009. He was the radiology director at Citizens Memorial before becoming a consultant. She is a patient liaison at the hospital. They love the city of 10,300 and hope to retire here. They sat in the hospital lobby Friday to talk with a reporter in hopes that people will better understand the challenges of mental illness.
The couple say their son has always been different. He was diagnosed with dyslexia soon after first grade. He was quiet and shy. Other children picked on him. He lettered in academics his freshman year of high school in Omaha. Two years later, he was expelled after saying he wanted to harm a teacher. He has homemade tattoos on his arms, belly and legs.
The couple has tried repeatedly to get help for their son. Over the years, he has received different diagnoses including Asperger’s and anti-social personality disorder. They’ve spent perhaps as much as $30,000 on repeated hospitalizations and medications. There is still a balance of about $9,300 from their son’s last stay at Lakeland Behavioral Health System, a psychiatric hospital for children in Springfield. They say the mental health system has failed them and their son.
“The system is broken,” Bill Lammers said. “The mental health system. There’s no place to turn to. You take them to a hospital, and 96 hours later they’re home. Maybe on Prozac, but they’re not fixed.”
They don’t believe in more restrictions on guns.
“I have guns, but they’re locked in a safe,” Bill Lammers said. “There’s no way I would leave anything out.”
The couple say it’s too easy to get released from hospitals and other places for the mentally ill.
“In a perfect world, mental institutions would open back up,” Tricia Lammers said. “You could take an individual there and train them to take care of themselves.”
The couple has not put up a Christmas tree this year. One of their family traditions is the Christmas pickle. Each year, they would hang an ornament shaped like a pickle on the Christmas tree. The child who found it received a prize. This year, there is no one to search for the Christmas pickle.
But Bill and Tricia Lammers don’t think their son should be released. They hope he is sent to a mental institution that is able to help him.
“I think they should keep him until he is fit to be a part of society, and that may be a long, long time,” Bill Lammers said.
Bill Lammers learned about the shooting in Connecticut in a call from his wife. He turned on the TV.
“You think, thank God it’s not Blaec,” Bill Lammers said. “I thank God we got lucky.”
“Everybody in our community got lucky because he wasn’t able to do anything.”
source
Bill and Tricia Lammers sat in the lobby of Citizens Memorial Hospital on Friday, a week after 20 children and six adults were killed at a Connecticut elementary school. Outside, the flag flew at half staff.
The couple has been here before. They have waited for hours as hospital staffers called institutions around the state, trying to find one that had an open bed for their mentally ill son, Blaec, 20. They have waited time and again, five times here and twice in other hospitals, long before November when their son was arrested.
The arrest came after Tricia Lammers told authorities Blaec bought an AR-15 and another semi-automatic from the Bolivar Walmart, the same store where he was found three years ago carrying a butcher knife and a Halloween mask with plans to kill a clerk.
His plans this time, authorities say, were to shoot up a movie theater showing the latest “Twilight” movie. Blaec Lammers is facing felony charges of first-degree assault, making a terrorist threat and armed criminal action. Since then, Tricia Lammers has received phone calls from people who say she’s heroic.
“I’m not a hero,” Tricia Lammers said. “With the events that happened last Friday my heart tells me I did the right thing.
“Our city could be in the news.”
Bill and Tricia Lammers miss their son. He has been at the Polk County Jail for more a month now. They can only see him on Sundays. For 30 minutes. They can’t touch him. He is behind shatterproof glass, and they can only talk to him on the phone in the visiting room. They mourn him as if — in a way — he is dead to them.
“I’m a mom,” Tricia Lammers said. “It’s the holidays. I don’t have my child.”
The couple moved to Bolivar with their two children in 2009. He was the radiology director at Citizens Memorial before becoming a consultant. She is a patient liaison at the hospital. They love the city of 10,300 and hope to retire here. They sat in the hospital lobby Friday to talk with a reporter in hopes that people will better understand the challenges of mental illness.
The couple say their son has always been different. He was diagnosed with dyslexia soon after first grade. He was quiet and shy. Other children picked on him. He lettered in academics his freshman year of high school in Omaha. Two years later, he was expelled after saying he wanted to harm a teacher. He has homemade tattoos on his arms, belly and legs.
The couple has tried repeatedly to get help for their son. Over the years, he has received different diagnoses including Asperger’s and anti-social personality disorder. They’ve spent perhaps as much as $30,000 on repeated hospitalizations and medications. There is still a balance of about $9,300 from their son’s last stay at Lakeland Behavioral Health System, a psychiatric hospital for children in Springfield. They say the mental health system has failed them and their son.
“The system is broken,” Bill Lammers said. “The mental health system. There’s no place to turn to. You take them to a hospital, and 96 hours later they’re home. Maybe on Prozac, but they’re not fixed.”
They don’t believe in more restrictions on guns.
“I have guns, but they’re locked in a safe,” Bill Lammers said. “There’s no way I would leave anything out.”
The couple say it’s too easy to get released from hospitals and other places for the mentally ill.
“In a perfect world, mental institutions would open back up,” Tricia Lammers said. “You could take an individual there and train them to take care of themselves.”
The couple has not put up a Christmas tree this year. One of their family traditions is the Christmas pickle. Each year, they would hang an ornament shaped like a pickle on the Christmas tree. The child who found it received a prize. This year, there is no one to search for the Christmas pickle.
But Bill and Tricia Lammers don’t think their son should be released. They hope he is sent to a mental institution that is able to help him.
“I think they should keep him until he is fit to be a part of society, and that may be a long, long time,” Bill Lammers said.
Bill Lammers learned about the shooting in Connecticut in a call from his wife. He turned on the TV.
“You think, thank God it’s not Blaec,” Bill Lammers said. “I thank God we got lucky.”
“Everybody in our community got lucky because he wasn’t able to do anything.”
source
Is he also left-handed? Because that is equally as relevant.
They don’t believe in more restrictions on guns.
“I have guns, but they’re locked in a safe,” Bill Lammers said. “There’s no way I would leave anything out.”
But... earlier in the article we learned that your son can buy his own. And did. From a store where he planned to harm someone with a knife. So...?
(All that said, these parents did something incredibly hard and are right about the need for better solutions for people with ongoing mental illnesses.)
There will be challenges. There's already questionable bias in our psych field, especially when drug companies get involved. Invent a pill for one thing that ends up doing another? How do we sell this thing? Oh! Invent an illness that just so happens to be cured by it! No big deal. Same thing with our regular medical industry. But in the end, I think the benefits might outweigh the costs, if it's done *right*.
there are so many problems going on here. what, lammers carries a butcher knife into a walmart and tells police he was going to kill a clerk there, and then that same walmart allows him to purchase assault weapons? i mean, hello you might want to have a problem like that on a record somewhere so it can raise a little red flag before the receipt gets printed out. just a suggestion.
Pretty much everyone who has said that he has a disability has been speculating, I think perhaps with the exception of the information that he may have been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. And even then, that is still just students recalling that they had been told he had Asperger's syndrome. By who, it's not revealed. Or even when or in what context. Like
One former classmate who said he was familiar with the disorder described Mr. Lanza as having a “very flat affect,” adding, “If you looked at him, you couldn’t see any emotions going through his head.”
This is a great example of confirmation bias. You know the young man killed 27 people, and that people are murmuring about him having Asperger's. You're a classmate of his, desperate to help the local police make sense of why he would do such a thing - and to be of some help to the journalist standing in front of you. Even unconsciously, your brain is starting to match the things you've observed about Lanza's behavior to what you know about Asperger's (since that's what they're saying he has!) and to sort out the things that don't match. It's natural human behavior. And what does "familiar with the disorder" mean? I know a lot of college juniors who would say they were "familiar" with schizophrenia because they took abnormal psychology.
I have rambled way off my point, but what it was is - people have such odd and inaccurate perceptions of mental illness and there's just a bunch of bullshit thrown in everywhere. Something like Asperger's gets confused with antisocial personality disorder, or people see a few sociopath movies and assume that everyone with any kind of mental disorder is dangerous. The most insulting thing is probably that when this national conversation happens after a school shooting, everyone turns to the mental health system and how it sucks. But nothing is ever done, and the insinuation seems to be that people with mental disorders are dangerous and need to be locked away from the "rest of us", not that they are people who are sick and need help.
This is some bullshit. And his learning disability is totally irrelevant.
And of course, talking about gun restrictions automatically means you want a fascist state, but rounding up all the mentally ill and sticking them in institutions is totally okay and not a fucked up ideal at all.
“I have guns, but they’re locked in a safe,” Bill Lammers said. “There’s no way I would leave anything out.”
Oh shut up. Your son was able to buy semi-automatic rifle and that is not okay. No one needs that. Restricting guns is what will decrease gun violence; not rounding all the mentally ill and sticking them in institutions.
The issue of them all being men is a conversation no one wants to have in the media apparently. Totally hear you on that one. -_- It's the clearest statistic there is, clearer than any correlation with any of the factors the media talks about, yet it's the one thing I've not seen mentioned once on US news websites. The news channels here say the US is discussing guns and not giving guns to mentally ill people. Here's a thought: don't give them to men.
Here's a good blog post from the excellent Shrink Rap about why most people with mental illness aren't violent (we don't usually have all of the risk factors).
Another post from Shrink Rap that's really worth reading: Please Don't Make Assumptions.
Aaaaaaaaand I'm done listening to you.
Real problem, stop derailing with it :/
But I guess I feel like 1) it's being directed onto mental health as a way to get away from the other issues, ie., guns, why it's males mainly doing this shit, etc, etc, Not saying mental health isn't a facet, but it's almost being used as a target or strawman? I mean a lot of people didn't give a shit about mental healthcare access when those of us with an issue are struggling to survive or just live our life in pain, but now that it intrudes onto everyone and makes everyones life miserable, it's an issue. Like, it should have ALWAYS been an issue, because we care about people, not because suddenly the mentally ill are getting spunky.
So we become charity cases for people who want to white knight and Find A Solution, generally so they can feel better about themselves, or we're someone who needs to go on a National Database Of Who Can't Own Guns even thought in reality we are more likely to be victims of some form of abuse that perpetrate this shit.
IDK, long winded rant is long winded and none of this is intended as offensive so hit me with the clue hammer if it is. I just have weird feels now that The Battle For/Against Mental Health is all the rage.
We also need less fucking guns, because I could be batshit fucking nuts, but I still can't kill anyone by standing in the street and yelling BANG BANG BANG at people.
Edited at 2012-12-26 03:12 pm (UTC)
There's a guy who threatened to kill someone who was allowed to buy guns at the same shop. The justice system didn't work on a "try to prevent crime" basis by actually dealing with the guy and making sure he wouldn't try to kill someone in the future... in that guys case that could have meant MI treatment, but this coukd have happened to someone without an MI too. I find it hard to believe all gun violence in the US is carried out my the mentally ill.
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Their son is not a mentally ill person who needs help. He's just an asshole without empathy. There's no way to rehabilitate that.
The couple say it’s too easy to get released from hospitals and other places for the mentally ill.
oh
eta: this is minor in the rich soup of Things That Are Wrong in this article, but "places for the mentally ill"? places for the mentally ill are the same places all people should have access to. you know like schools and universities, hospitals with informed and compassionate care, homes with heat and light and water, and public office.
Edited at 2012-12-26 07:25 pm (UTC)
That's where both systems fall down. There's often nothing available until it reaches the point that its so bad, it requires hospitalization. and then when you're out of hospital, no support to manage chronic long term problems. The trip to the hospital should FIX you! no more repairs needed! STAY FIXED!
overall health care, of all sorts, seems to treat people as if they can be fixed and made normal when what a whole hell of a lot of people need is health care, all types, to help them be the best version of themselves they can be. It's not that mythical "normal" but its still pretty damn awesome. That best version of themselves may always require a little extra help and maintenance to maintain, but its a hell of a lot more effective than the do nothing til they end up in hospitalization method... then chuck out of hospital when they're "fixed".... until lack of supportive maintenance lands them back in hospital to be "fixed" again.
So overall we probably need more transitional programs for people that are somewhere in that cycle where they don't need that acute care, but need some MANAGED care. Sort of along the lines of the assisted living for seniors. Not a full nursing home, but more the 90% independent living, but with someone attached to an apartment block that CAN help resolve issues, check up on people. Not a full time one on one caregiver, but someone that knocks on the door once a day and maybe makes sure they've eaten something, taken medication, and may be available to streamline some tasks (like can call and make appointments for people, or double checks that people using mail order pharmacies remembered to place a refill). So an apartment manager that also manages the PEOPLE that live there and streamlines and organizes many of those tasks so they have enough support with the basic things that they can spend more energy on dealing with more specific individual problems.
and you wouldn't even necessarily have to MAKE people go, if those were available. a lot of people with manageable conditions that just need help MANAGING would happily live in a apartment complex where they knew they could call the health maintenance person at 10PM because they were having a problem but weren't so bad they needed to go to the hospital. Maybe the health maintenance person comes over and checks their blood pressure and walks them through deep breathing exercises to stabalize things. Maybe they sit there and review their medication schedule and make sure they're not missing or doubling doses. Or they check things over and say "no, you're not being a hypochondriac, you should go to the emergency room" But having someone there to MANAGE some aspects of their health of mental health BEFORE things get to crisis level would likely be EXACTLY what a lot of people need. They don't neec their entire life micromanaged, just the occasional consultation or slightly course correction to keep them aimed at being the best they personally can be, and damned if that "best" is the picture of normal of not!
[TW: Abuse and Domestic Violence]
I left my abusive ex-partner a little over a year ago and I'm very lucky for the following reasons:
-- I left before my life was going to end
-- I had excellent employer-based health insurance coverage under my ex-partner
-- I live in an area where there are *two* research and teaching hospitals
-- My therapist at the time had clout and privileges at one of them (the one I went to)
-- I had prior experience dealing with insurance companies, the law, and advocating for myself with regard to other chronic illnesses I have to deal with
-- I have race and class privilege (:/)
-- There is a non-profit health group who has residential treatment and supportive housing programs for people with mental illness and substance abuse issues in the area
-- Thanks to the vigorous efforts of one of the directors and my social worker, they forced my insurance company to pay for my stay. If this hadn't happened, the cost would have been out of reach for me
-- I was "obsessed" with ensuring I had some kind of continuity of care once I was finished with the program
On the one hand, I received some awesome and compassionate care, while I was getting back on my feet, learning some new tools, learning some new life skills, and going through a ton of medication changes until the right combination was found. On the other hand, my case managers, the folks who checked in on us, and my therapists there were stretched and doing the best they could with the meager resources they were receiving from the state, the federal government, the insurance companies, and via donations.
But I did see, as lucky as I was, there were just some things they couldn't cover. Some people could live more independently than others, and those that really needed something between residential treatment and the hospital or residential treatment and supportive housing, really had no place to go. So again, they were "discharged" from the program, only to come back weeks or months later after they had another acute phase. Or they weren't sleeping. Or they weren't eating. Or they forgot to take their medications. Or they had difficulty managing the day-to-day things most folks take for granted when they are able to live on their own or with another person.
It's tragic. I met so many awesome people, who just wanted to maintain and to be left alone to live their lives however they could. And yet, how can any of us who deal with MI find equilibrium when the boat is always shifting and the weather is unpredictable, and the shore is so far away?
For me, personally, the entire experience was an eye-opener. But most of all, I sure did see the "good crazy/bad crazy" shit going on, even among ourselves. Nevermind, that none of us are monsters; we're just people dealing with the monsters inside our heads.
***
Yes, better, more compassionate MI care should be within the reaches of every American (and everyone, period). But honestly, it feels as though the whole MI discussion surrounding Sandy Hook is just a big Red Herring and a distraction from the intersection of gun control, racism, classism, ableism, grief, and trying to understand and explain (but not explain away) the evil that some people do because they just don't give a fuck..
it's just so obvious that most of the people talking about this don't really give a shit, because they didn't start caring about fixing mental healthcare until the issue started affecting people who aren't actually mentally ill.
I hear a lot about American's insurance plan denying coverage for drugs. How does that work, exactly? Like, what basis do they deny it on? I don't understand. My plans just automatically pay for anything I bring a prescription in for (they pay automatically at the pharmacy, I don't have to send it in). I've never needed to explain to my insurance plan why I'm taking a certain drug. How does it work in the States?
I have bipolar disorder and may have borderline personality disorder. Already, people with these and other diagnoses are seen as crazy and violent. THIS DISCOURSE IS NOT HELPING.
I'm a pacifist and I don't even kill bugs. During my first stay at a mental hospital, I met the nicest, most docile man who also happened to be schizophrenic. There is no connection here. But nobody is ever going to learn this if we keep linking mental illness with gun violence.