We seem to do this every time a young person commits acts of violence so horrific we couldn't imagine them if they weren't acted out for us. When 23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho went on a rampage in 2007 on the Virginia Tech campus, we waited not long to wring our hands over the sad, if predictable, circumstance that this struggling immigrant family had not cared properly for their son and our children died because of it. We had done a similar thing after the 1999 shooting in Colorado when Columbine students from relatively privileged families managed to build arsenals in their comfortable homes and went on to wreak their own havoc. In that instance, we railed that their parents were too busy leading their own lives to pay attention to what was going on with their kids.
I make no claim here of knowing one dang thing whatsoever about what the parents of James Holmes either did or didn't know about their son's mental health, nor do I have any information about any attempts they or any other person may have made (or not) to get help for the young man at any point in his life. I do, however, know something about raising a child who needs mental health services and what it's like to try to access that help and that's the story I want to tell here. There is no way that the story of what happened in Aurora, Colorado this week is complete, no matter what we learn in weeks and months to come, unless the truth is told about what it means for a family when a child needs help. If you believe yourself blessed because you think you don't need to know any of this, I hope you'll understand by the time you get through here that it is your business nonetheless. You or your children might be in the theater or classroom next time.
My second born, my son, was one of those kids who was just so dang cute, pretty almost, that perfect strangers loved to engage him wherever he went. He was also especially smart and very outgoing, very trusting, so he met few strangers and knew every bus driver on every route in the campus town we lived in by the time he was three and four. He seemed to navigate his world easily and happily.
When he began school, there were problems. More honestly, in retrospect, I should say that by the time he was in the first grade, there were problems being brought to my attention that I couldn't ignore, no matter how beautiful and brilliant and sweet and loving my child was. He was all of those things, but he was also very troubled and was acting out. So began my journey down the road to trying to learn how to best parent all of that.
The reasons for my son's problems don't matter for the purpose of this story, but they are not uncommon problems and the reasons or causes or responsibility or whatever you want to call it for those problems aren't exotic either. What makes this story unique is that my son got the help he needed and so many do not. That's what I want people to know.
By the time my son was about eight years old, I had already spent a couple of years during which there was rarely a week that I wasn't at his school at least once, summoned because of something he had done or, just as often, not done. I had met with school nurses and teachers and principals and social workers. Repeatedly. We did Cub Scouts, Big Brothers, and martial arts classes...looking for some place to channel some of his energy in a positive way. Later, I put him in a play group that was to be a sort of play therapy for troubled children. We would graduate from that to individual and family sessions with a therapist.
By the time he was ten, he was still my special-in-so-many-ways son, but he was getting older, bigger, and not better. On December 10, 1989, I had to put my son into a residential psychiatric hospital. On Christmas Day, his older sister and I spent what remains the most poignant Christmas of my life, visiting him, taking him presents to unwrap in the hospital "community room" off in a corner we snared for privacy among the other families mostly trying to maintain cheerfully stiff upper lips and some semblance of holiday for their children.
From that time on until my son would graduate from high school when he was eighteen, he never really "lived" at home again. That is not to say that I and his family were not involved in his growing up (we were very much involved), but his time "at home" was for weekend and, sometimes, several-weeks-long periods of time. The hospitalization was followed by a group home, which was followed by an out-of-state treatment facility. There were several emergency hospitalizations along the way as well. Friends, I'm here to tell you that there is no experience that can prepare you for the devastation you feel when you see your child being carried to a padded room and you know even through your pain that it's so he won't hurt himself.
By the time my son was ready to enter high school, we were able to get him placed in a wonderful residential program that was local to where we were living and had been highly recommended. The admissions process was long and arduous. It took over a year. And they had empty beds all the while. And we had funding to pay for it. But it was a place special enough that they cared enough about the ultimate well being of every child in their charge that my son sat on a waiting list for over six months of that time until they had the milieu they thought most therapeutic for him and the other children already there. My son would go on to live there for the entire four years of his high school career.
Interestingly or coincidentally enough, I got a call from my son tonight. I hadn't talked to him in months. He's almost 33 now, living his dream in San Francisco. We didn't talk about what happened in Colorado, but we did talk about that high school he attended, in another context. What he said to me tonight, and it's not the first time he's said it, was that the school saved his life. That's a quote. He added that he had no doubt that had he not had the opportunity to go to there, he'd be either dead or in jail now. He's said that to me before as well, and told me tonight that he's told his sister the same thing. I believe him, because I always knew it.
So, why relate all of this? Because I want you to know that it's damn hard to get help for a kid that needs it. The story I've related here is the story of my son and my family, but I dare say that there are few parents today who could, no matter their intent or willingness, access now the help I was able to get for my son then. In many cases, it mostly doesn't even exist any more. Even the wonderful school I just told you about doesn't operate today the way they did when my son went there.
It was not easy for us to get it either, and we certainly enjoyed circumstances many didn't then and don't now. Both my son's father and I worked and covered him on our insurance policies through our employment. We agreed to do this even though we were not together because we knew our son needed extraordinary care (there were some physical problems too) and it seemed the responsible thing to do. Our thinking was that there could be no downside to our both paying premiums for his insurance because surely what one didn't pay, the other could help with, right?
No. We learned early on about the "birthday rule." That's insurance industry speak for "we're gonna screw you anyway, even though we've collected your premiums." Essentially, when two parents cover the same child with different health plans from different insurers, the parent whose birthday falls earlier in the year is presumed to be the policy that pays and therefore determines treatment. Think of it as a lottery for the insurance companies, only one of them gets to win and you lose either way. My son would be uprooted from two different programs when the insurance carrier determined to call the shots backed out on what they agreed to fund and the second insurer disagreed with the treatment regime and wouldn't pay for it either.
Neither insurance company funded my son's care during the four years he was in a residential treatment program for high school. Not one dime. When we got to the point that it was clear if he were to mainstreamed in a public school he would be more warehoused than educated, I found an attorney who specialized in disability law. Fortunately for us, he was so appalled when he heard of my son's case, he offered to take it on contingent upon payment for his fees to come from the board of education if we won, or not at all if we did not. We won. My son won.
What I've left out is the daily toll this took on us all. For years. By the time my son needed help, I myself was working in mental health and social services, so I knew the ropes pretty well. But nothing prepared me for what we would endure in the course of it all. The meetings and hearings and adjudications and territorial disputes...the outrageous attempts that included even blatant lying in attempted ass covering maneuvers...every stop along our years' long journey was a battle. There were many days when I understood clearly that the only thing that kept me going was the knowledge that if I didn't, nobody else was going to. There were also days I wasn't sure if even that was enough. I was fortunate to work in a field that allowed a much more generous amount of time off than most people in this country enjoy, but even with that, I also had to miss a lot of work in order to advocate for my son.
My son's story is one of success. Like I also told him tonight, all I ever really wanted for either of my kids was that they end up as self reliant adults who were relatively happy with their own life choices and didn't live their lives in a way that causes harm to others. My son is surely doing that, but both he and I know it would not have been this way had he not received a lot of early intervention. And that's why this is a story that needs to be told now. Even with working, involved, well intending, insured parents, the road to getting help for a child who needed it was daunting. Today, it would be worse. I'll go so far as to suggest that it might even be impossible for 99% of us. And I'd further suggest it's only going to get worse. Mental health care in this country has been decimated for decades and is deteriorating again from even its already pathetically poor state. Today, my son would probably be medicated/drugged to the hilt, warehoused in a "special ed" class somewhere, and encouraged to drop out as soon as he legally could. The truth is, they tried to do those things then; the difference is that today I doubt I could successfully fend them off, never mind access the care that would save my kid's life and give society a productive citizen instead of a headline to recoil from.
I understand the desire to want to blame someone when something unspeakable happens and I've surely ranted about poor parenting I see every day. Mostly I despair at what it all means for the children who don't get help for whatever reason. But I think the real moral to this story is that it's of little use to blame parents for not accessing what doesn't exist or is impossible because of lack of resources to access even if it does. If it's possible for even one good thing to come out of the Colorado tragedy, maybe it can be an increased awareness of how sorry the current state of mental health service is in our nation. But we have to have the right conversations in order for that to happen.