<p>Ok, but when it reached the point of calling the police, that seems different.</p>
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<p>I’ve heard people suggest this before, but I don’t agree with it, because as I said, if the parents don’t do something, NO ONE else will. They have got to try, regardless. Otherwise, all is lost, and I am not ready to accept that, I guess.</p>
<p>He spoke to the dad the night before
The dad said he sounded fine and ER suggested that they get together for lunch on Saturday. </p>
<p>So who knows how manipulative he was when the police stopped by or on all the other calls with his parents. </p>
<p>I didnt say, thats what I would have done.
But that may have been behind their reasoning.
They did send the police.
My grandmother used to send me across the lake to check on my mom all the time ( who was on heavy meds).
She didnt call my sister who lived closer to my mother, Im assuming because I had a closer relationship with my grandmother.</p>
<p>Bay, I agree with you. If I truly thought my kid was suicidal I’d be in a car or on a plane personally bringing them home. And, he wasn’t even attending school. This is just not something you can or should expect to manage long-distance. But it starts to sound like parent-blaming, which it isn’t. </p>
<p>The police didn’t really report back that he was okay, though. That’s slightly unfair since they don’t know who’s okay and who isn’t anymore than anyone else. Maybe, less. They see a lot of crazy. To clarify, the police had him call home where he once again manipulated his parents…</p>
<p>You wouldn’t go visit your son if you thought it would make him more likely to kill himself, Bay. You would frantically think of things that might help, and maybe you wouldn’t be able to think of any of them. Maybe you’d feel like you’d already tried everything.</p>
<p>Is that what happened, CF?</p>
<p>Something to also think about in light of reports the murderer was reported to have “been disturbed” since childhood. The disorder which some suspect of co-existing with whatever he had from childhood may not have developed until late adolescence/early adulthood. </p>
<p>His family members aren’t mental health professionals and the professionals he saw in childhood may not have spotted the disorder because it may not have manifested itself at the time they saw him. </p>
<p>It’s difficult enough for a parent to do the right thing when dealing with a normal child much less a child with issues. Look at this thread, everyone has a different idea how they would respond under a given situation. We try our best, but the strategies that work for one child may not work for another. A lot of parenting is instinctive and also by trial and error. I have four children and each is completely different…even my twins who are much alike, respond differently to stress, praise and discipline. </p>
<p>In my younger sons case, our earliest fears centered around his delayed development, his immaturity, lack of focus and the fact he was totally disorganized. As he got older (with the onset of puberty) our concerns changed…mainly that he had few friends and didn’t socialize and he developed anger issues. Still we were never worried that he would hurt anyone else…our biggest fear was suicide. My husbands brother committed suicide when he was 25 and according to my husband he was a lot like our son. In hindsight, given the recent number of young men going on these mass shooting rampages we were probably naïve…and lucky.</p>
<p>Fortunately for us, my husband was able to be there everyday for our son. (on campus) They would have lunch together several times a week and he was able to keep close tabs on his academic progress. When he missed a class or failed to turn in an assignment, my husband would hear about it from his colleagues. But how many parents can “attend” college with their kids? It’s not realistic.</p>
<p>I also recognize that as well as my son is doing now that can change. What if he loses his job or his relationship with his girlfriend changes? I don’t anticipate either happening but you never know. My son is totally different person today. He is now a confident, well educated young man with a great future. We still keep a watchful eye on him as well as all of our kids. </p>
<p>I’m curious, after Newtown et al., and not counting this incident, are there any parents of loner, moody sons on this thread who <em>didn’t</em> contemplate whether this could happen to him too? Again, maybe it’s just me (but I doubt it), but the fact that this young man, given his profile, killed himself and others is not shocking to me. But it is profoundly sad. Because I still believe that most of these potential killers can be stopped if we take the time to figure out how to do it, and that requires micro-analyzing everything that was done or not done in this case. </p>
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<p>This is fantastic. But the point is, if this is what the kid needs, how can you do it if the parent is not a professor in the very department where the kid is studying? As rubrown says, you can’t. Other parents can’t find out if their kid missed class or didn’t hand in an assignment. Other kids need that same kind of attention, and there is no way for them to get it.</p>
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<p>As a rule, this is not true. At one of my kids’ colleges, the student can sign a waiver giving his/her parents access to his/her grades, and the college itself encourages every student to do so. Also, I was told by a Dean that he can contact each student’s professors and find out what their grade is at the moment, and whether he has missed class. I didn’t think to ask the Dean if he would tell me what he found out, but he would use it to counsel the student in question, at the very least.</p>
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<p>Not every college is inclined to encourage students to sign waivers giving parents access to his/her grades or have Deans willing to check individual student grades and communicate that to parents upon request. </p>
<p>In fact, there’s been many threads here on CC about how many colleges don’t do that because they misinterpret the 1974 FERPA. </p>
<p>In this case, the SBCC administrator had no problem telling the world that ER was not enrolled there, and when he stopped being enrolled, so I assume s/he would have told his parents this, too, if they had asked. Unless of course, FERPA rules don’t apply after death, which I don’t know.</p>
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<p>That’s what they SAY. But in practice, it doesn’t happen so smoothly. At three different colleges, they were all, yeah, yeah, we’ll keep you up to date, we understand your child has a disability and needs intensive monitoring. And at three different colleges, it didn’t happen.</p>
<p>I’ve heard the same thing from other parents. There’s the story you hear, and there’s the reality on the ground, and the reality is that professors don’t update the records, they don’t inform the administration when they say they will, and nothing happens until it’s too late. </p>
<p>Do we know for sure that the parents thought he was attending school.? We know for sure he told them he was hating SB because a former roommate overheard the unhappy phone calls. It sounds like he was fairly open with them about his misery. When he wanted to go back after the roof pushing incident and the counselor recommended against it, his purpose was retribution. </p>
<p>There is no FERPA after death.</p>
<p>My impression is that there are some colleges (not the ones like Harvard, Yale and Oberlin, whose students do well on autopilot), who not only respect that parents are spending a lot of money, but are cognizant of their own interest in ensuring that their students do well, stay enrolled, and graduate. The college I described seems to be one of these. It is probably not alone. but I don’t doubt there are others that will say anything to look good.</p>
<p><a href=“not%20the%20ones%20like%20Harvard,%20Yale%20and%20Oberlin,%20whose%20students%20do%20well%20on%20autopilot”>quote</a>,
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<p>Not all students do well on autopilot at such schools. Some classmates at Oberlin crashed and burned academically to the point of being academically suspended or expelled. Others had no problems slacking off because they were secure in knowing there was a job/position in a business or non-profit being run by a family member or close family friend without any requirements beyond getting that degree…or sometimes not even. </p>
<p>One older friend would have benefited greatly from support services from the disability office if his parents had listened to some relatives’ and HS counselor’s advice to have him tested in HS when they noticed issues with organization, reading speed, and getting work done on time and if confirmed, get him that support from our college. </p>
<p>However, because he skated through his private school to being top 15% of his class, his parents didn’t heed those warnings. Ended up paying heavily for it when he ended up being placed on academic suspension and struggling academically in the very same courses I had no problems with. </p>
<p>@Bay SBCC was trying to say he wasn’t theirs. From the manifesto he seemed to have enrolled regularly, then stopped going to classes but was enrolled this semester. This semester he only took online courses because of his broken leg last fall, but was mentally just there ‘to give humanity one last chance’ and to plan his Day of Retribution. It was a show to justify being there, but he put on the show, every semester. He just hadn’t shown up to COMPLETE classes since 2011, his first year.</p>
<p>One thing I wonder is if he thought he was running out of time, if there was some deadline on how long he could be there, given his lack of success. He kept putting it off because he didn’t want to die (well, and had broken his leg, so he put it off another six months, then had a cold so put it off another month…) he went out every day to enjoy life before he died as he put it. And he said this was the last day he could do it because it was the last day SBCC was in session (the graduation was that day.) I wonder if he wouldn’t have been coming back next year.</p>
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<p>I think that’s changed a lot in the past few years and in my neck of the woods, therapists use email and some even text, which I think is more problematic than email. Most therapists have their work email address on their website and many referral websites use email for online contact of potential clients, paving the way for clients to use email. In this day and age people use the Internet to find a therapist and want to ask questions via email. It is certainly worthwhile for a therapist to set limits about what email is appropriate for – scheduling, etc. and that it is not to be used for clinical issues, but in this day and age, a therapist who refuses to use email is going to have some trouble communicating easily with clients and potential clients. A therapist has to be very careful about what they say in email, of course. In this case, the client emailed the therapist, not the other way around. The therapist responded with a phone call to the mother. Why the therapist didn’t directly call ER or the police, I don’t know. That email seemed more than enough to trigger a Duty to Warn response.</p>
<p>A lot of the suggestions on what the parents could have done are suggestions that might work on a kid who is pretty functional. Kids who are not functioning well often lack the capacity necessary for those interventions to work. </p>