Mental health care policy (a response to Connecticut)

This is intended to be a non-flamey offshoot of the Sanctum Santorum thread on Gun Control for those of us who would like to discuss mental health issues.

Obligatory note: the vast majority of people with mental illness are not and never will be violent, except in some cases to themselves. As a person in treatment for chronic major depression, I have an interest in dispelling stigma, not perpetuating it. I still think this discussion is worth having.

While we don't know if Adam Lanza had an illness, I believe good mental health care could be a useful preventative to mass shootings. It would also have lots more benefits which overall would improve life for people with mental illness and the people around them.

Here is a blog entry from the father of Jani, a girl with childhood onset schizophrenic (he's been on TV and written a book on his experiences, so you may have heard of the case. He is responding to the Connecticut shooting. About halfway through, he suggests a concrete action: mandating "assisted outpatient treatment," that is, the ability for the state to force people into treatment or face involuntary commitment.

New York's "Kendra's Law" is an example. It applies to people who are "unlikely to survive safely in the community without supervision" based on clinical determination, and who have a history of noncompliance with outpatient regimens. As you can imagine, it's been controversial on a number of axes including the rights of people to control their treatment and allegations that it has been disproportionately used to control black men.

An independent study at the 10-year mark indicates substantial but not spectacular success rates in reducing violence, suicide, homelessness, and institutionalization. From my quick reading, it appears the study concluded that the court order part was not the key--the key was the simultaneous increase in resources. The court order did, however, seem to make it more likely that the providers would pay attention to the recipient.

So what do folks think? if we are to advocate for changes, what should we advocate?

For one thing, I think we need to continue to destigmatize mental illness. A few nights ago I had a conversation with my father wherein I tried to explain that when he calls the mentally ill "Crazy" and "Wacky" and "Wacked out", he is not helping the situation. The whole thing didn't go over his head so much as just bounce right off.

Well I think it starts with teachers. Given the setting they are the ones who should be most likely to detect a problem...however...

most of the time signs of any problem are ignored, or even outright caused. Because of the differences people inclined towards mental illness, teachers tend to treat them less than favorably. Bullying is also a problem, but a lot of people don't seem to be aware that teachers are often the initial cause of bullying as the children pick up that the teacher treats them differently and doesn't like them, giving them free reign to do whatever they want. And that often happens.

I believe that when it comes to the most recent shooting, the killer had deep trauma associated with childhood specifically, and probably school. It's not much of a stretch to imagine that he was abused in school much like I was. And it all happened probably just as young as I was, because then a motive to kill children that young is more clear. Children's real feelings and pain are often completely ignored, especially in schools. They are treated no better than cattle. And those are the 'normal' children! Now, apparently the guy had some form of autism, which makes my theory even more likely. Autistics have a high rate of abuse by school staff.

I believe that if schools treated children better, this and other incidents wouldn't have happened. These people choose schools for a reason.

I agree that this is also an important discussion.
LK (and others after him) linked this in the other thread. It's a tough read, but points to some of the issues.

I'm not sure you can lay treating and dealing with mental illness at the door of teachers. Yes, it is a good idea if they are trained in understanding how to spot the signs of a dangerously mentally ill child but right now in the US there is likely no point as even if the teacher could identify those signs they would have nowhere to refer them to. Mental illness is a problem that needs massive resource investment and specialist staff if you are going to tackle it effectively within schools and surplus resources is not something that the average school or teacher is overburdened with. I doubt that many/any teachers go into teaching to abuse mentally ill children and it seems ridiculous to lay a systemic societal problem at the door of one of the few professions that still clings to the vestiges of the idea that society has a responsibility to improve the lives of its citizens.

One of the main reasons a lot of the shooting happen in schools and universities is pretty simple, they form one of the stages of life where a mentally ill person is likely to be continually surrounded by a lot of people who form potential vulnerable targets in the event of catastrophic breakdown. When mentally ill people slip dramatically over the edge later in life they can still kill people but usually the places that they base their lives around aren't such target rich environments. So you get tragic family killings or workplace shootings that don't make such nationwide headline news. The other reason is of course that young, still developing minds are much more vulnerable in general to extreme swings of emotion which can form a dangerous cocktail with some forms of mental illness.

In short, if you want to fix the problems with mental illness fitting into the rest of society then you need to fix them everywhere with a huge investment in infrastructure, training, awareness, staffing and free provision. Randomly assigning blame to teachers, law enforcement, other kids, violent films or video games is just a distraction.

Do you have anything to back this up, or is it just a "it happened to me, so it clearly happens a lot" inflation? Because if it's just the "it happened to me" thing, I gotta tell you. I was bullied pretty hard in 7th grade, and my teachers fucking loved me. It's just my bulliers weren't stupid enough to do it in front of them, and I was too ... whatever I was not to tell anyone. So while I'm sure my teachers probably noticed I was quiet and withdrawn and didn't seem to have many friends, there's no real reason they should've thought I was something other than "shy."

I also really don't feel comfortable laying something like that on a profession that's already so overburdened. I do think schools can be shitty and they need to not be shitty (I was lucky and went to fantastic public schools), but I have a hard time laying that all on the teachers themselves.

That article crashes the living fuck out of my iPhone. Browser needs a restart before I can even use it again. Wow. First half looked terrifying :(

I teach, so obviously my perceptions are colored by that.

First off, I believe schools the way they are set up in most part of the world will result in children to bullying and abusing each other. Kids and teenagers have limited impulse control and overwhelmingly are even worse at thinking about the consequences and effects of their actions on others than adults are. As other hierarchies and authorities are for the most part outside their immediate social circumstances it becomes up to the kids to sort out their internal social rules and relations mostly on their own, and unsuprisingly it often goes the way of Lord of the Flies.

Most teachers I know would stop bullying if they noticed it or knew how to get at it. But if you have a class of 30 children most of the children and their interactions will be outside your view, even in the classrooms. And then even when you do notice it, curbing it in the classroom might or might not help outside the classroom, at recess or on the way back to and from school, on social media etc etc.

As an aside and addendum to what Sjofn shared, I was also bullied, and had no problems with teachers. But my class teacher was sinply not aware for the better part of several years that I was bullied. Perhaps he should have noticed, but he didn't. When he finally was told by a craft teacher that I was being bullied by a slew of other boys he acted on it against my express wishes, which was fortunate since it caused the bullying to diminish, if not stop.

As a further addition it is not uncommon that if schools/teachers tries to communicate to parents that their child has trouble of some sort, whether stemming from something deserving a diagnosis or drug abuse or that they are involved in bullying or harassment, it's a bit of a toss up if the parents are receptive to this information.

Though some of the comments on that article are entirely reasonable the others are written in MRA gall and FOX feces.

I never read comments on anything anywhere.
This and Facebook is the only place on the internet, where I read what others have to say on stuff - both places have an ignore function in my control.

I used to write for a tabloid. When I was more naive and the internet was younger, I even tried to engage with the readers/commenters under my articles.

Mental health is something that a society needs to deal with effectively for its own protection, and a modern society needs to deal with it humanely. Inhumane options that have been tried are things like than burning people with outlier behavior as witches, shoving them in Bedlam-style institutions, letting them beg on the street, or I suppose drafting them into armed forces. Right now we are closer to the beg-or-Bedlam-style treatment than I really like to think about (with prison or prison-like institutions serving as Bedlam).

Schools are an obvious place for health screenings of all kinds (although some types of disorders, including schizophrenia, rarely manifest before adulthood). But it should not be a teacher's job, other than being aware of behavior that should result in referral. Teachers aren't Swiss army knifes. Teachers have a specialty, teaching, which needs to be respected.

Teachers can actually be pretty good at spotting kids with mental health issues. My mom has taught pre-school, kindergarten and grades 1-3 (so for non-americans, that's like 5-10 years old), and still teaches first grade today. She can spot the kids that need help, but often times the parent's are unwilling to either accept that the kid needs to go to special classes, or that the kid even has a problem. It can be a real problem when you have 27 kids, and 25 of them know all their letters and are ready to learn to read, but 2 of them don't know all their letters and have behavioral issues. The parent's are unwilling, flakey, and won't put the time in to help their kids. What do you do? Go over all the letters and hold back the 25 kids who need to learn how to read?

I actually wish we had more mental health institutions, right now, it seems like the only options tend to be prison or the street.

Good, well-funded institutions would be useful.

I apologize if it sounded like I'm laying all the blame. I'm just saying it starts with them. Parents can also be a problem, and even if the parents get the children help, institutions are not very good places and psychologists are prone to misdiagnosis or may accidentally worsen the problem, and psychiatrists may give out prescriptions that they shouldn't. I'm also not saying that teachers have malicious intent. I'm just saying it happens often and is likely a cause.

What I'm saying is you can't pin the blame on mental illness. The mentally ill are more likely to be victims than anything else. THAT is what can turn into violence. If one is constantly abused regardless if they are mentally ill or not, they could be driven to actions like murder or suicide. This problem is not something that can be easily solved by pinning blame or even fixing one single thing.

You have no idea how often abuse in schools happens and it's sickening how people think it doesn't happen often. I'm autistic myself, and have a few other autistic friends and guess what...they all have similar stories of abuse like I experienced.

If you think it doesn't happen read these:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/...deo-unveiled-And-a-child-is-killed-at-school#
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/201...-10-to-expose-bullying-by-teaching-staff?lite

http://www.webmd.com/parenting/features/teachers-who-bully
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/30/john-rosi-washington-midd_n_1841998.html
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/lo...-for-kindergarten-s-bully-revenge-4091294.php
http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2008/may/24/30gtteacher-lets-students-vote-out-classmate-5/
http://www.disabilityscoop.com/2009/11/13/bullying-survey/6184/
http://www.educationnews.org/articles/20389/1/The-Teacher-As-Bully/Page1.html

All I'm saying is that experiences like this can easily drive people to do what he did.

I think if he had gotten proper help it wouldn't have happened, but he also probably wouldn't even have had those kinds of thoughts in the very first place if stuff like this didn't occur so frequently.

I wasn't saying it doesn't happen, I just was wondering if you had, like. Studies. I'm not saying teachers are blameless, holy creatures, I just think your words "often," "frequently" and "most of the time" are words that need to be backed up with more than "it happened to me and some of my friends."

I see...

Well, and here I was beginning to think we couldn't pin the blame on anything but teachers, parents, psychiatrists and psychologists, and not, you know, the one facet of a person's makeup that, if left untreated, renders them relatively incapable of controlling their own machinations.

I showed examples and those are just the ones that were publicized. Believe me I thought it was just me and them until I read about it. There are teachers out there that are incredibly amazing too, but they are so rare that a lot of people like him have not even encountered a single one, and that in itself is a tragedy.

Aka "People with psychological problems are dangerous and can't control themselves and will attack everyone because they are mentally ill."

That being the victim blaming attitude this very thread is criticizing.

The people I mentioned are the very people who have the most power to be helpful. But that belief is part of many many many many aspects that hinders the helpful part and allows the hurtful part to have as much influence as it does. Because obviously we should fear the mentally ill and believe none of them are capable of the same level of thought that "normal" people are.

Mental illness is not always something people are born with having. They are born with the predisposition towards it, and the brain develops differently depending on ones life experiences. If someone experiences trauma, it spurs on the development of the mental illness more easily than other experiences do.

Regardless of that, if we could lessen the trauma children face, then people in general would be better off and lessen the likelihood of this happening. That's why I say it starts with teachers because in young childhood they have the most power (even if its the parents who are abusive, the teachers can pinpoint it and call CPS, but of course that system is also royally fucked up, basically everything is, but we all know that already) but children's feelings aren't something that people account for very much.

Basically I'm saying that it's a combination of trauma in childhood (especially done by authority figures, the very people who are supposed to protect children) and society's beliefs and functions that has a bigger influence than mental illness itself. I'm obviously just not saying it very well and people are misunderstanding...

I am not sure that jumping straight to accusations of victim blaming is the reaction that I would have had if I were in your shoes.

Those are examples, yes. Those do not show it happens "often," "frequently," or are the cause of anything "most of the time." Again: I was not saying it never happens. I was even willing to believe you were using those words due to having read some studies about it. But you evidently did not.

As far as I know there is no official study that uses numbers (believe me I've been looking for years, though I do recall reading some journals that mentioned it, one of which being "Social vulnerability and bullying in children with Asperger syndrome" but no specific statistics focusing exclusively on authority figures in school), and it's probably because people like you don't believe it happens often enough to warrant a study. And I don't want to get into the subject of WWASP schools and the like because it's irrelevant to the subject at hand though. Using 'most of the time' specifically was definitely a miswording, but it is sad how people hinge on that instead of maybe considering that these things do happen and that preventing them is probably the best and easiest course of action to attend to first.

You seriously need to calm down. "People like you" is not the sort of rhetoric you want to be throwing around here. Moreover, it, coupled with your statements regarding how you can see how someone would target schools (and by proxy, teachers and bullies), might portray you as being sympathetic with the shooter in a way that moves beyond simply identifying with an anger at a system that failed him (all of which is theoretical projection, anyway). It is, in fact, moving into us-vs-them territory.

So his mom was a survivalist, he was removed from regular public school to be home schooled. There are questions as to if he was on medication or not, and if that medication had changed.

This is the sort of mire we are dealing with. Where do we draw lines. A mentally ill child, may have mentally ill parents. The medications for them may worsen the situation instead of better it, and we may not know til the dead are on the floor.

I would be incarcerated I think, my son most certainly. My Loon would be free and clear. Out of the three of us, Loon is the most dangerous. He is the one that actively studied and plotted during those very years that seem to catch these young men. It was one bad day from a smoking crater.
Now? He has a family, a wife, a reason.. still the switch is there. If everything went away, he would make sure everyone knew it.

The conversation here, there.. everywhere is between the gun issues and the mental health issues. The stigma is vast. Have many of you sought public mental health care? You are treated as a druggie who just wants a free high. If you demonstrate any real issues then they would rather not serve you, the phone calls aren't returned. I often think the system would rather you find a corner to die in.

I suppose I would like for this conversation to steer back to trying to address the mental state, but I know that will get us no where fast. Humans are complex animals and we haven't a clue how we work.

"People like me" like studies, actually. Because "people like me" are aware that a personal perception of a problem can get blown out of proportion or significantly downplayed, depending on one's personal experiences. "People like me" are also aware that teachers already get a huge amount of work dumped in their lap beyond "teach this subject" already, and are definitely not paid enough to do it. So unless it does happen "most of the time," or even just "often," I do not, in fact, think dumping yet another thing into the lap of teachers to take care of as the First Line of Defense Against Mental Illness would be the best and easiest course of action without (brace yourself!) some significant research to back it up.

This is not just the USA. As soon as the economic crisis hit, people in the Netherlands stopped giving two shits about people with mental illness. I've seen up close how a family almost got torn apart by schizophrenia. The person should have been taken into care a lot sooner than she did, but there were no places available and there was no money to spare. It almost destroyed all the people involved and the way it was treated was one of the most sickening sights I've ever set eyes on. And this person was lucky that she had a family that would still take care of her. She could have just as easily been thrown out on the streets.

People like to look away from the homeless man shouting at nothing, but he isn't there because he wants to be.

Teachers can also be shockingly bad at it too, suggesting that kindergartners who can't sit still all class, have even minor problem paying attention when a subject bores them, deal with bullying by fighting back, etc. should be on meds.

I've been the "parent unwilling to accept their child's problem", and frankly the teacher was out of her depth dealing with something she had no clue about (e.g. other teachers had no trouble). More tragically I've seen some of my sons' peers whose parents took the advice and had their children medicated to be suddenly tractable but also numbed. Kids who I've coached Soccer for and so have first hand experience with when I say they were only marginally worse than their peers' average behavior.

Anyway, that's not to malign teachers, as they're still probably the most likely to first notice problems. You have to be careful of the stigma that comes attach with being officially labeled a "problem child" though, due to the false positives stemming from such diagnosis not really being a teacher's specialty.

And RE: the teachers, I actually have something constructive to say about this, and it ties in with my other comment. It really is Christmas.

I truly believe that none of the people involved in the case above wanted that to happen. I mean, there was one grossely incompetent person involved, yes. But the hospital didn't like the fact that there were not enough resources to commit someone. You can't blame any one person because it is the system as a whole that is at fault. Everyone tries to do the best with what they are given. Sure, people fuck up sometimes but it is the health care system that allowes this sort of thing to happen.
The same goes for the teachers. No teacher goes into teaching to not care about kids (besides the very rare exception). They surely don't do it for money. The answer to this isn't "let's shit on the teachers, because that hasn't happened before right?" By putting it all on the teachers you are doing victim blaming MeganeOverlord. Because they are as much powerless bystanders as anyone, even moreso probably, because they see these childeren every day but they can't help them.
You need to see the difference between laying the fault at the mental illness and laying the fault at the person who has it. It doesn't "start with" the teachers, it starts with the fact that someone has mental illness or another condition that causes them to be 'different' and needing a different treatment than the standard, and their surroundings not being able to deal with it. Those surroundings include teachers, yes, but also parents, grandparents, other kids (especially other kids, because kids lack understanding and are unforgiving), coaches etc.

The problem is how mental illness is treated in society as a whole. Teachers can't help that they haven't been given the proper tools to deal with this stuff because of the social stigma's that lay on it. It needs to change. The whole goddamn system needs to change.

I'm not angry though. Just sad that people are taking things out of context. And I am sympathetic to the shooter, as well as the victim's parents and the witnesses, and the victims and the teachers and so on. All I'm saying is that teachers have the most power in this situation, a power that can be used to harm but also help. A teacher can ruin a life but they can also save a life. It starts with them meaning, they have the best ability to change things due to their position of power.

This is a lot of what I'm trying to say. I'm not saying teachers are bad people at all. Especially the bolded part. That's what I mean by "it starts with teachers".

I'll quote someone else in hopes to get people to understand.

"I was talking with a co-worker and I explained how kids with ASDs often get bullied to the point of trauma and that is what can cause incidents like these.
Not the disorder itself, but the trauma, and that teachers often participate. And her response was basically yes."

Their participation may not be knowingly, by just simply treating a child differently that child becomes a target. And because of the stigma of mental illness, and especially the belief that children are to be seen and not heard, if the child were to speak about it, they can be silenced and called liars. Hurt by the very people that are supposed to be protecting them because the teachers aren't given the right tools to deal with them. For example, responding with absolute rage towards a child's unusual behavior, thinking a child is being rude intentionally when they really have no clue that what they are doing is considered so (I get the feeling that my 'burning at the stake' so to speak here is a similar situation). Yet nobody tells them and instead responds with anger.

.

If people actually listened to more than a couple poor choice words they'd realize it's obvious that's what I'm saying and that I'm not putting all the blame on teachers. I truly believe that they need more pay and definitely need to be allowed more imput on how they teach children, they are victims of the system too (All the best teachers I had either died or were bullied by the administration). I believe the stress of that on top of having a "problem child" can lead them to act out, as they too, are only human. But because they are responsible for children it can led to horrible consequences as seen above which leads to trauma, and in some cases it can be bad enough to drive someone to kill if there's no one there to care about them, mental illness or no. If we learn to treat children better then the trauma that can lead to that would never happen in the first place.

Well Megane you sound more reasonable when posting at length but I still suspect you are slightly letting your own experiences colour your perceptions of an entire profession and the normal dynamics somewhat unfairly, though it is of course possible that you are just falling into the ever present trap of making your statements appear more assertive and confident in your conclusions than you intend! I tend to leap in with furious, battle-hardened postwalls on even a single solitary sentence that I determine with my doubt-o-meter to be lacking the appropriate quantity of uncertainty. It's a personal problem, my own posting is mysteriously exempt, and I'm refusing therapy.

From my own anecdotal evidence, I would hazard a guess that the opposite pattern holds true and that autistic spectrum disorder children are on average more 'popular' with teachers due to their love of structure and the dedication they apply to set tasks rather than being distracted by social cues. The few teachers I've known love kids that do the work, care about the subject and make their lives easier by doing well on tests. Indeed much of my reading around the subject has centred on how the more subtle autistic spectrum disorders tend to manifest most obviously once a child has left the structured school environment and is exposed to a world without teachers and timetables.

I think we are all agreed though that what is really needed, if you really want to solve these problems, is more public investment rather than knee-jerk bans and blame apportioning.

Because of the bolded part, I still say we disagree fundamentaly. Teachers don't have the power to help. They could have, if it was recognised that teachers need proper training, but they don't right now. You're right in saying that they are in a situation where it is probably first detected, but a) teachers aren't properly trained for this, the only reason they could know is if they are already perceptive of these sort of things or have the experience. And b) have nowhere to go with that information once they have it. If we really agreed you wouldn't talk about teachers as a group, but the system of education.

And also, choice of words matters, especially in a sensitive subject like this. I am not native in this language, yet I weigh every word with care and try to look for the best translation of what I'm trying to say. Yes, there might be a spelling error every now and then, but that's not the point. The scale on which everyone 'misunderstood' you was big enough that you need to look at your choice of words a little more carefully.

Well the thing is we're more prone to behavioral problems and perceived hostility. Due to sensory problems the school environment is very harsh and can lead to lashing out (not with violence, towards others, but disruptive behaviors such as screaming and self harm). For to the teachers and other students, its for no apparent reason. When the reason can be obvious enough to them. (say, another student whispering quietly to themselves or a particularly noisy clock ticking) use we often have trouble communicating our feelings, the reasons may not become any more clear when asked, but if a child acts like that they aren't asked and are instead punished.

In the journal that I mentioned, as well as my own experience, friends' experience, and other peoples experience in a support group I used to go to, we have a tendency to be extremely nieve and literal, and because of that we experience a situation where we are told to do something by another student, so we do it. More malicious kids can take advantage of this. For example my friend as a child was told by another student to hit them, so she did. The student immediately told the teacher and she got in trouble without having any clue what she did wrong. Unrelatedly but also related to poor mental health care, we were both misdiagnosed with ADHD, something that also happens frequently. Myself not getting a proper diagnosis and treatment until age 16. Part of this being that in non-school situations I didn't have any of the problems I displayed while in school.

I was liked by some of my teachers in high school (an experience drastically different from elementary where I was pretty much universally hated and infamous between them all, being well known by teachers that weren't even mine), but by that time I became so 'be quiet and do your work' kind of person that they literally didn't notice I existed and I frequently had to contend with the attendance office to prove I was there.

Especially when young, a child can care too much about a subject and hold the class back by bombarding the teacher with questions. I'm sure everyone has had that one student who is highly intelligent but keeps asking more and more questions and derailing the class and irritating everyone around them. A student like that likely has some form of autism. I became literally afraid of asking questions by age 8 because of the backlash. I was seen as obnoxious, rude, and questioning the teacher just because I wanted to learn more. When you are that person, it becomes disheartening because no one tells you why there is a problem with what you're doing (if you probably noticed, this is a common theme.)

You would think logically that people of this nature do well with their teachers, but there poses an issue when theres a major dissonance between their intelligence and behavior, like a 6 year old operating on the gifted level in intellect, but has the behavior of a child several years younger. Teachers just don't know what to do in situations like that. A child who does so well in a subject, but has a total meltdown when told that its time to drop everything you're doing and move on to a completely unrelated subject. Autistic meltdowns are often viewed as temper tantrums, but they are really the child being so afraid and frustrated they don't know what to do or how to communicate it, as I've mentioned these meltdowns often include self harm. Unlike temper tantrums which are intentional on the child's case, an autistic meltdown is embarrassing and unwanted by the child. It's basically akin to a panic attack, which those who suffer from anxiety disorders have received similar punishment for similar reasoning. They could see the child as something like "they are so smart but often talk back to me", the latter not being intentional but rather the child's attempt at simply asking a question but their behavior being viewed as insubordination. They may not even necessarily be good in school because of all the distractions and noise and may have trouble following directions.

Anyway I do apologize for my poor wording. I know I have a bad habit with wording things as absolutes and tend to have trouble expressing emotion, getting my point across only in long monologues or essay format.

They do though! They can notice a problem easier than anyone else can. They can't treat the problem obviously, because that's not their job. I don't mean in treatment but rather pinpointing a problem and treating troubled kids with respect. Until 3rd grade I was in trouble constantly (calls home several times a week, too) but my 3rd grade teacher understood me and there was never any big issues until substitutes who didn't know how to deal with me came in. She also personally taught me better ways to deal with my feelings and treated me with respect. Sadly she died, but she was one of the most wonderful people I ever met. And my 8th grade English teacher quite literally saved my life by helping me get therapy during a time when I was about to end it all (I put on a smile at home so outside of school no one could tell anything was wrong). He would also talk with me like I'm more than just a number or a problem child but a human being. The other teachers during that time would just watch as the students tormented me and seemed to get some sort of sick thrill by putting me near the very people who were the most harmful. The system of education is screwed up but I'm living example that a teacher has enough power to save ones life. Not directly necessarily, as they can't adress the core problems, but they are in such an amazing position.

As for wording...that's the exact thing. I do choose my words carefully, which is part of why I almost never speak unless necessary in person. It takes too long to properly form the words and by that time what I have to say is irrelevant. I always think there's no way it could possibly be misinterpreted but it often is anyway despite how hard I've worked to word things as best as possible. That's part of the problem with autism as I mentioned before, being interpreted as rude and careless because we make the mistakes rude and careless people do without actually having rude intentions or actually being careless. I'm definitely at fault and not saying I'm not, it's something I'm constantly working on 24/7, but viewing an autistic person with the same motivations and thought patterns as a neurotypical is something a lot of people do which leads to problems for both parties. I don't expect special treatment, but it DOES help to say something like "Hey what you said is being interpreted like this, is that really what you meant?"

I don't feel like there's going to be any sort of conclusion about this, but I just want to say a few more things before retiring from this discussion.

You completely missed my point. Yes they can notice a problem, but the problem is they won't in a lot of cases. Not because they're lazy, not because they're dumb but because they haven't been given the proper training to spot these kind of signals. You're anecdote is actually a pretty good illustration of my point. You had a teacher who spotted the signals and knew how to deal with it. Then came a string of teachers who didn't. I don't want to play down the horrible experiences you obviously had, but I sincerely doubt your teachers "got off" on putting you in those situations. It's a stupid and oldfashioned way of teaching, but the "make them sort things out amongst themselves" is still an approach. I'm not saying they weren't wrong in doing so, I'm saying they probably didn't realise that. What other training do they have to deal with this?
But I'm making assumptions on stuff I shouldn't, since I don't know your exact situation. I'm just saying, this is another perspective on things that you need to consider. Especially since this thread is not about autism or the educational system, it's about mental health care. Which brings me to my second point.

I don't need to look any further than my own family to see examples of both autism and mental health problems. I've seen enough of both to know that they are in no way the same thing. I dislike the course this thread has taken, since it's a derail from something that is in several ways pretty personal to me (let me also state that I don't suffer from mental health problems, thankfully). I think that the educational system is a crucial part of making mental health less of a taboo, but the turn this discussion has taken is going in a different direction. I get that you were making a statement about mental health in education, but I feel like we're derailing too much.
Besides, I feel like we're talking past each other here. You keep reacting to things I'm not saying, or at least I'm not trying to say. Same with making the 'victim blaming' accusation to Bryce. Maybe it's because I've come to know Bryce as a pretty thoughtful poster, but I didn't see anything that could be interpreted that way.

I don't interpreted your post as rude at all. I didn't mean to say I thought it was careless, because this discussion obviously means a lot to you. The problem is that sometimes I think your posts are a little contradictory and it makes it hard to follow what point you're trying to make exactly.

How I think mental illness procedures with children should work is something like this:

- Government awareness campaigns on how to spot the signs of mental illness in your child and what to do when you do spot them.
- Child is born with mental illness
- Parents bear the prime responsibility for spotting the signs of mental illness in their child, followed by the child's extend family.
- There is a second line of defence in spotting mental illness formed by adults that have close contact with the child including social workers, medical staff and teaching staff.
- Once some of the signs of mental illness are identified the child is referred to a well trained specialist who gives an accurate diagnosis and works with parents, the child and appropriate authorities to form a well resourced treatment plan.
- If their illness is going to mean they are disruptive in a classroom environment then consideration must be given to either moving the child to a local specialist school or assigning a full-time (and specially trained in the child's condition) classroom assistant who sits with them in all lessons to help them and also minimise disruption to the other students.
- The child gets ongoing therapy outside of school and is provided with any specialist equipment that is needed to properly manage their condition.

What we shouldn't do is just say 'Teachers should just get better, it's their responsibility' and move on. A teacher is only one human being and simultaneously balancing the tasks of behaviour management for 30 children and producing an engaging lesson many times a day is already an impressive feat without adding the weight of having to properly care for any conceivable mental illness that might walk through the classroom door. Secondary/High school teachers often only get to spend a handful of minutes attention per pupil per week as it is and any child that takes much more than that to deal with is necessarily sucking time away from everyone else that might also need it just as much. It's just about possible that a superhuman teacher could manage to balance the needs of a regular class of surly teenagers and multiple varying mental disabilities on their own but if you build a system that only works with super humans filling the roles then it's the system that needs to change and not the people in it.

The reason I focused on more subtle forms of autism (like that formerly known as Aspergers) is because those conditions are so subtle that because of their social basis (saying the wrong thing, not responding to non verbal cues, talking at the wrong volume) they are often the ones that slip through whatever net is in place to catch people and I guess seem more likely to lead to the kind of stories we often hear about in mass killer backgrounds (shy, quiet, no friends, good student, liked computers). The rage, loneliness, separation and frustration at being excluded from society builds up and boils over and noone notices them because they moved through life without forming the kind of social connections that would have noticed. If the autism is far enough down on the spectrum that the person in question is regularly having autistic fits, disrupting lessons and hitting other people on request then they are, I would hope, going to get noticed. It is usually the kids that don't get noticed until it's too late that seem to be behind the spree killings. Anyway, that's why I was focusing in that direction but all types of mental illness are a societal problem that we need to deal with, not because it will protect us from getting randomly shot but because it is the right thing to do.

It sounds like more people than I would have thought were bullied or had bad experiences in school.

I rarely saw any of this type of thing.

I'm sorry again for also derailing it, I didn't mean to at all. I don't think I missed the point though, I don't think teachers are properly trained to deal with mentally ill children. That's not a personal fault on most of them, but it's because of being so ill equipped that it's very easy to mistreat the child, and I feel that it was specifically trauma in very young childhood that drove that man to do things. Basically, it's not the mental illness itself that drives people to kill, but rather the treatment they receive that traumatizes them. I'm also specifying young children because experiences in childhood are the ones that cut deeper. I wasn't treated too well in high school either, but by that time I was older so I could shrug off the cruel things some of the teachers would do without being too hurt by it. I knew that they weren't to be believed but as a child I took those things to heart. I really feel like they are really ill equipped to deal with even students who are just different because of the one-size-fits-all model...but again that's derailing and I really shouldn't do that. I feel bad about messing up the whole topic.

I definitely feel as if parents should be better education on mental illness too, but I don't like the misconception that a child is always born with a mental illness. They are born with the predisposition towards it, too. That's not saying there aren't any children who are born with mental illness, there are plenty. But a lot of mental illness don't develop until later in life. At least in my classes, I was taught that it's like some sort of switch. There are billions of chemicals and neural pathways in the brain and life experiences effect all that, so traumatic events in early childhood can be the "switch" that turns on the development of a mental illness. Basically, if we can help children NOT get traumatized, less of them would suffer mental illness. Of course, there will still be many, many children who can't be helped that way as the brain is so unpredictable and of course that people can be born with mental illness from the start, but I think focusing on treating children better in general is an important thing to try to do.

In terms of autism, it's not the autism itself that is the problem but the treatment of people who display it.

Dan Lawrence

, what you said sounds pretty spot on (I especially agree being the right thing to do), but I do want to point out that it was the Asperger's diagnosis that I had gotten, as well as my friend. As I said we were both mistaken for ADHD and the school (yes, the school, not a psychiatrist, in my case it happened twice once in 1st and another in 5th...) wanted to force ADHD meds without even a proper diagnosis. I was lucky to be able to avoid it due to having educated parents, but she wasn't so lucky and actually developed OCD because of being given the meds that she shouldn't have been given (though it had to have been a psychiatrist who gave them, I really have no idea what could be done to help that issue) . We certainly were noticed, but such "notice" wasn't compassion or proper treatment but abuse by the system and teachers. I heard various accounts of people with Asperger's who end up becoming withdrawn as they got older specifically because of the mistreatment they were given when they were younger was so bad it traumatized them to pretty much complete silence, as it was in my case as well, though I was always shy and it only worsened over time. It's also important to note that not every withdrawn person has a problem and some people are completely happy to be that way.

I know teachers have a lot of their plate. Sometimes it's just so hard to figure out if there is a problem, it's not necessarily up to them to figure that out, but I think it IS important to learn to approach children with kindness and empathy and not abuse them (I don't mean never punish a kid, obviously, I mean not outright abuse). This goes for parents too, from what I heard this guy had a pretty bad home life as well. I don't think people would kill their own mother for no reason, afterall. Not to say they deserved it, no one deserves to be killed, but it sort of explains some things.

And even then, good help is so hard to find...there are so many good intentions, but they all get screwed up. It seems like children are only even given any sort of treatment if they are causing a hassle for adults, and the children's feelings themselves are ignored.

Bah, I didn't mean never, but it is true that the mentally ill are more of a danger to themselves than others. That doesn't mean that they can't get violent due to mental illness. Believe me, I've seen that happen, too. It's pretty ignorant to assume I'm only talking about autism (especially because those who are afflicted with it severely are likely to bite and hit you because of the frustration of having limited verbal communication) but it was also bad of me to word things in such a generalized way to make it seem that way. I was a psychology major for a few years in combination with reading outside of class but took a temporary hiatus to work so I do have some idea what I'm talking about.