<p>What is this about disapproving of the kid’s drinking? He was 22. Did I suddenly miss something, and all of your kids are teetotalers?</p>
<p>The NY Times article is scary and sad. Someone upthread asked if anyone felt sorry for ER. I do. He was locked in a box and didn’t know how to get out of it. </p>
<p>GP upthread kept talking about intensive therapy. There is no standard therapy that is proven to work for people like ER was in his grade school and high school years. (And by the way, his symptoms <em>scream</em> Aspergers.) Obviously the schools tried, and the mother tried, and nothing worked. Autism is not like anorexia or suicidal depression, where intensive inpatient mental health treatment can make a difference.</p>
<p>And then after high school, the parents were trying to transition him to adulthood, which is what parents do with Aspies after they turn 18. They were letting him try independent living, which is a step on the way to adulthood, and often for Aspies not an easy one. </p>
<p>rubrown, it’s good it worked out for you and your son, but people could look at your situation and say you were overprotective, that your son lived in a controlled environment and that if anything had happened (say he was dismissed from his frat and had to live elsewhere) he wouldn’t have had basic knowledge of how to handle money, how to buy that pizza with cash, how to make change.</p>
<p>John Hinkley’s family followed the ‘tough love’ plan and forced his to go it alone. Although it had worked for many other privileged youth, it was a disaster for him.</p>
<p>I just don’t think they had had prior reason to flag ‘the way he spends money’ as one of his issues. They had him on various sorts of watches, including social models, and that one just wasn’t on their radar.</p>
<p>and I agree that many parents welcome the need for their kids to learn budgeting in college - while they still have a meal plan so they don’t starve to death, in our case. I have one son I think will hoard everything and one I fully expect to run out early - once. I’m hoping he will learn from it. He will have cash. And he saved birthday money, and many families (us included) primarily give money for birthdays for those in their late teens since they know exactly what they want most, and it may be a concert with friends.</p>
<p>But then, my kids are working this summer, so they will have that cash, also.</p>
<p>“rubrown, it’s good it worked out for you and your son, but people could look at your situation and say you were overprotective”</p>
<p>Maybe, you have to know your kid, which is why professional help is so unhelpful. Which, I agree with arabrab, it is.</p>
<p>The reason I read for 6 officers showing up is because at least two of them were familiar with him from his past issues. The reported candle theft and the roof pushing incident. So, he was on their radar as slightly off-kilter, but not a suspected mass murderer. That’s a bit much to expect, imho.</p>
<p>I would guess that drinking is not the best idea if you’re taking psychotropic medication. </p>
<p>There doesn’t seem to be a difference that is detectable by outsiders beforehand between the tens of thousands of kids who are slightly off-kilter and the one kid who turns into to be a mass murderer. A switch to treating tens of thousands of weird kids like future mass murderers would be a bad move, in my view.</p>
<p>Again, “independent living” to me carries certain assumptions and responsibilities. I don’t see how YEARS could have gone by without the “Elliot Rodger Isla Vista experiment” being deemed a failure by the parents. I don’t blame the parents for not being able to predict that their son might turn out to be a mass murderer, but I do think they took the easy road by not demanding some accountability from him on how he was spending his time and their money.</p>
<p>My understanding about Xanax is that it’s taken episodically for anxiety attacks, like Advil for fever or aches and pains, or a rescue inhaler for asthma. It’s not like Prozac, which the person suffering from generalized anxiety would take every day.</p>
<p>So then someone could take Xanax on a Wednesday in response to a panic attack, and then go out drinking on Friday, without concern about mixing the drugs.</p>
<p>I do, because the “Fang Jr independent living in city X” was deemed a failure after two years. Fang Jr was in a somewhat supervised (but less supervised than we thought!) situation, so it was not exactly the same, but my point is that with Aspies, one can hope for quick success but never expect it, and setbacks and restarts are normal.</p>
<p>shrinkrap wrote: “What are the other high risk practices?”</p>
<p>I am looking at the form now, and the question is part of the “practice profile” section, and I don’t think all of them would be considered high risk. For example</p>
<p>“do you keep records for each individual patient?”. Some others are
“if your practice includes prisoners, is this a correctional facility?”. There is a group of questions asking
“do you advertise as a specialist in the evaluation andtreatment of anyof the following; borderline PD, chronic pain, multiple personality disorder or dissociative disorders, childhood sexual abuse, eating disorder, sex therapy.” One question asks about
"forensics, include child custody…, juvenille justice and violence…explain on a seprate sheet. " The next question is “do you communicate with your patients via emai…please explain tne nature of communications in detail.”.</p>
<p>“Thats horrible, arabrab. Was she on 1:1 or 15 min checks?”
1:1 the first day, 15 min checks day 2, which is when it happened.</p>
<p>I brought this up because my family was shocked to see how mental health professionals (many, not just one) intentionally avoid obtaining information other than directly from the patient, and the (perplexing, to us) reliance on trusting what the patient tells them even when patients have a long history suggesting that their connection with reality might not be that strong.</p>
<p>As one of my siblings said, “I guess the inmates really DO run the asylum.” </p>
<p>Those who blame ER’s family for failing to take certain measures despite ample evidence that ER’s parents sought professional help at virtually every turn simply don’t understand the realities of mental health treatment and support in this country, even before a patient reaches 18. Once the patient is an adult, the flow of useful information narrows to tiny droplets, and reassurances that you would be notified under certain circumstances turn out not to be true. </p>
<p>Mental health patients who are treatment compliant and generally cooperative probably do ok in the system. Others, not so much. Yet the whole system seems to be set up under the concept that the patients have good executive function and are reliable narrators. </p>
<p>@Cardinal Fang I was referring to my under age son, not ER. I didn’t want him drinking and I certainly didn’t want to pay for it. </p>
<p>I absolutely feel sorry for ER. We have a young boy aged 20 with Asperger’s who lives five homes down from ours. I saw his mom and dad about a month ago and asked how he was doing. He has just completed two years of community college and will be transferring to Rutgers in the fall which I was thrilled to hear. Of course my husband volunteered his services if the boy needs any help what so ever ie navigating the system or ever a ride home.</p>
<p>So, later I asked my one daughter if she ever speaks with him…I noticed they were Facebook friends, and she said yes…but only on Facebook. I asked what they talked about and she said most recently it’s been about prom dresses which I thought was funny and asked why prom dresses…she said it was what he thought SHE would want to talk about. He’s also really into history and he talks to her about that as well. Based on this, I think the internet could be a tool for these young Aspies to develop social skills. Just a thought.</p>
<p>@twoinanddone I totally agree. I know we did not teach our son how to budget or handle money and I worried about that. When he got his job offer and we knew he would be moving away, we worked with him to set up a realistic budget based on his take home pay. He seems to be doing fine. .</p>
<p>jym, what I was asking was whether the xanax abuse was known to his parents at the time. If we are criticizing the parents because we are so certain that under the same circumstances we would have made better decisions, we need to know what the circumstances were.</p>
<p>The parents knew he had it because the family spokesman said it came from a family doctor. I don’t know about abuse. That, I did not see reported, anywhere. The spokesman said he thought ER was on it for 6 months. I don’t know how anyone would know about abuse, really.</p>
<p>Yes, and no. Aspies, or at least a lot of Aspies, have trouble with the non-verbal part of communication. That means they’re going to be able to communicate better when the non-verbal part of the conversation is reduced. Online conversations will help Aspies make online friends, but they won’t help Aspies strike up conversations with attractive strangers at parties, or have conversations with acquaintances that they’d like to know better.</p>
<p>One thing that strikes me about Rodger is the gulf between what he imagined would happen when he encountered a young woman and what actually happened. He clearly imagined that the young woman would just come over and attach herself to him. What’s more, that’s what he thought was happening with the young men who were successful in attracting young women. </p>
<p>Here was a guy who wouldn’t look a person in the eye and who would barely say a word, and he didn’t see that he was different from the successful men. He had this cargo-cult idea that if he wore the right sunglasses and drove the right car, it would all magically happen. He was amazingly blind to all social communication. If you look past the vile misogyny, you see a guy who doesn’t understand what is going on, at all. </p>
<p>When Fang Jr. was little, we used to call him Mr. Oblivious. I see that in Rodger too. He was so, so oblivious. </p>
<p>actingmt, but Xanax is not typically taken every day, is it? That is, knowing a person has a prescription for Xanax is not the same as knowing they should never drink.</p>
<p>Perhaps there is a useful legal angle here, or at least potential precedent. If ER was known to his parents to be mentally ill/suicidal and they financed his unsupervised lifestyle, then it is arguable that they may at least be negligently liable for his gun violence. I’m fairly certain that if Nancy Lanza had lived, at the very least she would be dealing with similar claims (and possibly criminal ones in her case as well). </p>