<p>I may be the only one on here who has read some PUAHate postings. For the most part, they rip on the PUA community, their misogynistic ways, and not on women - not psychotic at all.</p>
<p>Couple of things…</p>
<ol>
<li>Ethical mental health professionals shouldn’t be making comments on a specific case where they weren’t involved in the assessment/treatment–and if they were involved, there are confidentiality issues with speaking publicly about it, of course.</li>
<li>After you know someone committed a violent crime, especially a very public mass homicide, your view of things you hear, read, or remember about them will be biased towards confirmation of what you now know–20/20 hindsight…</li>
<li>Sensitivity and specificity are also an issue. If you take 2,000 people with a specific profile and one or two of those people turns out to be a mass murder, is it practical and ethical to lock up/prosecute/remove rights from everyone with that profile, even if you’ll also be catching 1,988 people who wouldn’t have been violent criminals? What if its 10 out of every 2,000? It’s a debatable question and one that people tend to go back and forth on, largely depending on what’s currently in the news.</li>
</ol>
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<p>Practical? No.
Ethical? We have laws on the books about under what conditions mental illness could result in the loss of the right to own a gun. It is not the correlation that matters (the majority of mass murderers had a diagnosed mental illness), it is the causality that matters. Someone with illness X who has expressed violent thoughts, and…maybe. Someone with illness Y who has delusional fantasies that he is a Leprechaun, nope.</p>
<p>I wonder how much we know about this extended family of ER. All we really know is from the perspective of ER in his manifesto. He hates his stepmom because she is too strict, and he is angry with the dad because he always takes her side. He kind of likes his mother because she seems to be more lenient and let’s him get away with stuff, which didn’t happen with the stepmother. He was very upset that his father was gone for long stretches of time because this meant he had to be alone with the stepmom. He even had to travel with her to her native country for an extended period of time without his father. He hated it and was eventually sent home because he was so miserable. He describes a period of time where the mom and stepmom were arguing about him. Apparently he wasn’t allowed to go to the Dad’s home and the mom was upset with them because she felt it was unfair. </p>
<p>I still think it is atypical to financially support your 22 yr old son in an apt in a college town when he hadn’t gone to school for three years or had any income for that period of time. We also know he wasn’t taking his medication or consistently seeing a therapist. I would have wanted to know what he was doing every day at the very least.</p>
<p>Anyway, I think there is more there than meets the eye with this family. Obviously, I can’t know for sure but surely those who feel the family did all they could are guessing, too. Usually, a kid like ER does not magically appear out of thin air; rather he is a byproduct of a dysfunctional family which fostered an environment which helped to produce the finish product, such as ER.</p>
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<p>I look at the state laws on this, and as far as I can tell, only Texas mentions specific diagnoses (IL mentions mental retardation)–all others mention that the person has been declared a risk of harm to self/others, declared incompetent, or involuntarily committed, I can tell you that risk assessment in general (the decision to put someone on an involuntary hold) is not at all diagnosis dependent but mainly based on risk factors–intent, lethality, availability of means, etc. Diagnosis/symptoms may factor in to that, but it’s far from the only/primary criterion.</p>
<p>Also, again, sensitivity and specificity-assuming a majority of mass murders have a mental illness (which is very broad–antisocial PD is very different from depression or anxiety) still leaves the question of how many people with those same diagnoses aren’t violent. </p>
<p>@Goldenpooch from his past behavior it didn’t look like he was necessarily able to be successful in college. I don’t expect the parents to make him live under a freeway bridge instead. Not everyone is capable of holding down a job if they are mentally ill. Do I think he exhausted them? Kinda, but they were in there absolutely trying, and trying new things when the prior one didn’t work. If they had abandoned him, as you seem to be suggesting they should have, frankly I’d think worse of them than I do now.</p>
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<p>Kinda like comparing the writings and/or ramblings of a psychotic killer to some stuck up NY bankers… </p>
<p>collegevetting, I am not suggesting they abandon him. I would use the financial leverage to force him to go into an appropriate therapeutic program and would insist he take his medication. ER doesn’t strike me as the type of kid who is going to choose living in the streets if faced with the choice.</p>
<p>“but they were in there absolutely trying, and trying new things when the prior one didn’t work.”</p>
<p>You are speculating about what they did and did not do. The only thing we know for sure is that he wasn’t doing anything constructive, like seeing a therapist (enrolled in a program) or taking medication, for the last few years. I find it remarkable that he was allowed to do nothing for three years and received financial support to live this very destructive lifestyle. If nothing else, the parents are enablers.</p>
<p>I don’t think any of us can really know what the day to day life of ER or his family was like. His parents sound like caring, dedicated people who did what they thought was best. I would not surprise me if they were in therapy (probably separately as they were divorced, but maybe there was some family therapy) to thy to ddiscern how too best manage the situation</p>
<p>What their attorney and family adviser want you to know and what is the truth is probably not one and the same.</p>
<p>Outward appearances can differ dramatically from the reality. I don’t know why so many people here are apologists for ER’s parents. We really know very little about them.</p>
<p>And I don’t get why some are so quick to hang them out to dry. I’ve worked with parents of young adults with mental illness or substance issues. They struggle mightily to deal with having an individual who cannot consistently make good decisions or manage things in a stable fashion. Have some compassion.</p>
<p>GP, here’s how it goes. You say, Elliot, if you don’t go to classes and visit your therapist we’re going to throw you out of the house. And Elliot says, OK, I want to go to classes and pass them.</p>
<p>And then three months later you discover that he stopped going to classes a month before, because he is impulsive and makes bad decisions, and he can’t get back on track once he goes off track. And so, there you are, throwing your disabled kid out onto the street.</p>
<p>Now, I’m sure that you would have no qualms about throwing your disabled kid on the street. After all, he’s not perfect, so he won’t fit in with your perfect family. But the rest of us think it’s, in general, scummy to throw a disabled kid out on the street, even if they screwed up yet again.</p>
<p>You think your kid would respond to incentives. He would, but unfortunately, he wouldn’t keep responding. After a few weeks, he’d oversleep because he was up all night playing World of Warcraft, and he wouldn’t want to get up for class. The idea that Dad would throw him out on the street would be overcome by his desire to go back to sleep, and besides it’s just one class. And one thing would lead to another, and there he’d be, way behind in class, yet again, and not really knowing how to fix the situation. So he’d go back to playing World of Warcraft. </p>
<p>^^^ Exactly.</p>
<p>When you are “up close and personal” with a child who has mental illness issues and you see how wonderful, caring parents struggle mightly, you will realize how much the theories of “how it should be done” are just that, theories.</p>
<p>I also realized that the best way to have dealt with that batter is to go high and outside after an earlier brushback pitch. I can’t believe he missed that and instead tried a fastball. Geesh, do they not know what they are doing? </p>
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I don’t know jym626. I don’t see GP’s posts that way. We try to do the very best for our kids and one of the things we do is to involve them in athletic and/or artistic activities. It helps boost the child’s self-esteem if he develops talents and skills. It looks like the IV killer wasn’t exposed to any of those activities. I believe he was also anti-Asian which is quite sad considering his mother is Chinese. I think it would help multi-racial children to be positively immersed in both their parents’ culture so he develops an appreciation and pride for both heritage. </p>
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<p>He got to visit his mother’s side of the family in Malaysia on at least one brief occasion as a child. </p>
<p>However, that cannot overcome mostly growing up in two White dominated societies, the fact his father divorced his Malaysian-Chinese mother when he was a child, and the fact while growing up he very likely noticed a disparity in the difference his mother and more Asian-looking relatives in her side of the family were perceived due to her apparent race and much lower SES position compared with his father. </p>
<p>Especially considering his father seemed to have been descended from a once prominent British gentry family with the associated social prestige and connections it brings in Britain and to some extent, the US. Something which he proclaims quite proudly in his manifesto while being glad his Asian side “didn’t show.”*</p>
<p>The differences in treatment based on whether a biracial Asian-American who is also part White could pass completely as a White person or not has not only been discussed extensively among Asian/Asian-American Studies scholars, but also experienced with a few bi-racial Asian-American HS classmates and younger relatives. </p>
<p>Many of the ones who like the murderer could effectively pass for White had greatly different experiences than those who couldn’t pass or non-biracial Asian-Americans like yours truly. </p>
<ul>
<li>Unfortunately, this form of internalized racism and shame is far from a few isolated cases in the larger Asian-American community. Heck, I know some “full-blooded” Asian-Americans who are so open about their self-loathing and hating anything associated with their family’s ancestral heritage that I’ve and others…including non-Asian-Americans have told them off and minimize the time spent around them to what’s necessitated by school, work, and social obligations.<br></li>
</ul>
<p>“You say, Elliot, if you don’t go to classes and visit your therapist we’re going to throw you out of the house”</p>
<p>No, I didn’t say this. I said the financial support stops if he doesn’t take his medication and get himself in an intensive therapeutic program. Why would I finance a destructive lifestyle in a college town where he is obviously getting worse?</p>
<p>The publisher of the largest online newspaper in Santa Barbara said the following in today’s edition. I agree with all of it.</p>
<p>"I think it’s also fair to ask why the killer’s parents thought it was such a good idea to send an emotionally fragile young man — who reportedly had been in therapy since he was 8 years old — to go live in a hedonistic college town 100 miles from home, all by his lonesome and with no adult supervision.</p>
<p>In what universe is that responsible parenting? Other than the one David Attias’ parents live in, of course.</p>
<p>One could argue — as his parents’ legal and public relations representatives no doubt will — that the killer was of legal age, and a grown man at 22. All true, of course.</p>
<p>But, according to Santa Barbara City College records, he had last completed a course in 2011, when he took a grand total of three. Since then, he had been an occasional student, sporadically enrolling in classes only to drop them or just disappear.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, he was apparently jobless but living in a furnished apartment in Isla Vista, driving a $60,000-plus BMW coupe, appears to have had all the latest technology, and had money to buy food, clothes, video games and semiautomatic weapons.</p>
<p>Just a typical 22-year-old, right? No. Not even in Santa Barbara."</p>
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I 100% agree at this. I also agree that it is very challenging to parent such a “child” (especially after he has grown up) by the parents themselves. It is “inhuman” to ask the parents to shoulder all the responsibilities because most parents who are put into that situation are most likely just incapable of going for it all by themselves. The society as a whole should be more willing to support a family unfortunately burdened with such a unbearable duty of parenting such a child.</p>
<p>Both the parents and the society do not handle this case responsibly before it is too late, IMHO.</p>
<p>When something awful like this happens we get upset/angry and want to look to find causality or blame, to make sense out of something nonsensical. Until we have walked in his parents shoes, we do not know what they endured or what they tried or were advised to do. In some cases, “tough love” is appropriate, and they might cut the cord and the financial support. In other cases, as other have said, its hard to kick a disabled person to the street.</p>
<p>From TIme magazine-- just another perspective.
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<p>And the link to the other article: <a href=“Frantic parents of shooting suspect raced to Isla Vista during rampage”>http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-frantic-parents-isla-vista-shootings-20140525-story.html</a></p>
<p><a href=“http://time.com/121682/isla-vista-shooting-elliot-rodger/”>Isla Vista Shootings: Lessons in Mental Health | TIME;