Newtown: An American Tragedy (25 page)

Liza Long says she draws on her own personal experience and that “countless” emails of support from other struggling parents of autistic kids are proof that a problem exists. “The violent behavior is the elephant in the room with the autism community. How do we begin to fix it if we can’t even acknowledge it?

“To say that the potential of violence isn’t a factor with autistic kids just isn’t true. We are talking about a community of very unique people who see the world in a different way from the rest of us and have different triggers.”

In many ways Liza Long’s obstacles with her son have mirrored Nancy Lanza’s plight with Adam. For Michael, it appeared that one big behavioral turning point came when trying to make the transition from elementary school to middle school, where he couldn’t
adjust to changing classes, becoming overwhelmed by the sounds and lights. Adam had similar struggles with the transition.

“For someone like my son, from a sensory integration standpoint, there couldn’t be a worse place for him. The large fluorescent lights are always on. It was never quiet. It could literally put him right in a state of psychosis,” Long said.

Michael is also prone to becoming easily fixated, but fortunately for Long her son obsesses over stuffed animals and Greek mythology, not violent video games and firearms. Because of her own experience, Liza Long shudders when she sees the news reports of only twenty-six victims, believing that Adam Lanza was a victim of his mental illness and of a society that hasn’t given the proper attention and tools to appropriately deal with it.

“It is obvious just by looking at pictures of Adam that he wasn’t getting the proper treatment,” Long added. “Adam was absolutely responsible for his actions, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a victim.

“Adam Lanza was a mentally ill man who did an evil act, then committed suicide. Adam is a victim of not having the access to the resources to get him the proper treatment. He’s a victim of his parents’ crumbling marriage, which is hell on earth for special needs children.

“Adam Lanza is the twenty-eighth victim.”

I
n the days immediately following the tragedy in Sandy Hook, news reporters from around the country began scouring the town for any morsel of information they could find from former friends or classmates who knew Adam Lanza. “I knew of him, but I didn’t know
him,” was the common refrain from young men who were about Adam’s age.

When seemingly everyone was connected through social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter, it seemed impossible that anyone could hide so completely, especially after having lived in the same small town of 27,000. Adam Lanza managed to become the closest thing to anonymous anyone could find in a tight-knit community such as Newtown. The Lanza home rarely had visitors. Within Nancy’s small pocket of friends, only a few had been inside her house over the past two years. Adam would go several weeks at a time without leaving the house or talking to another human being other than his mother. Few noticed. Those who did chalked it up to his “strangeness.”

When Nicole Hockley, whose son Dylan died in the Sandy Hook shooting, spoke at a community safety meeting, she told the audience that even before the shooting occurred, the Lanza home was the only one that wasn’t completely part of the community—“a black spot in the neighborhood.”

“No one spoke about them. I’ve never heard a neighbor speak of them. Perhaps if there was more engagement within a community with neighbors looking out for each other, supporting each other, then maybe they would have gotten help in a different sort of way. But to know everyone on your street except for one house, and that happens to be a house with people that—or a person who does this—that’s kind of hard to swallow. So there is some regret there.”

Of the few people aware that Nancy Lanza’s son was troubled, most of them assumed that she was dealing with it. Outwardly,
Nancy rarely talked about or displayed the kind of internal stress she was experiencing with her son.

“Nancy always put on a happy face. She wasn’t the kind of person who felt comfortable talking about her personal problems or complaining,” said one relative. “We knew she was having problems with Adam not wanting to leave the house, but no one knew to what extent.”

John Cacioppo, a social psychologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has researched the effects of isolation on the human mind and believes severe cases can cause several potentially unhealthy changes in perception that can ultimately lead to violence. “Isolation isn’t at all what people thought it was, and it’s a lot more important than people thought it was,” Cacioppo says. “No matter what social species you’re talking about, all the way down to fruit flies, if you isolate them they die earlier. It lowers your impulse control and essentially triggers a self-preservation mind-set. A lonely person’s brain is always on the lookout for social threats.”

If a social person sees someone else in trouble, they are more likely to help because they feel empathy, but if a lonely person sees someone else in trouble it triggers a self-preservation instinct because they don’t have anyone to take care of them, according to Cacioppo. He noted that lonely people show heightened focus on negative thoughts and perceptions. They also tend to find greater fault with themselves and those around them; they expect others to be less friendly, less kind. They’re bracing against “social threats,” but those expectations have a way of fulfilling themselves, Cacioppo says. In the negative-feedback loop of chronic loneliness, self-protection turns out to be self-defeat.

The effect can be even worse for isolated people who seek comfort on the Internet. People who use the Internet to generate or enhance in-person relationships can benefit, while those who use online connections as a substitute for face-to-face ones become lonelier and more depressed. “Isolated people can become fixated on their immediate environment. If that environment is guns and violence, it has the potential to lead to problems,” Cacioppo said.

For up to fourteen hours a day, Adam sat alone in his windowless basement playing violent video games in the months leading up to the savage shooting. Sometimes he dressed from head to toe in a military uniform like the character in the game as he shot at paper targets with a pellet gun.

“He is like a zombie in front of the screen,” Nancy Lanza complained just two weeks before she was found murdered in her bed.

Many wanted to blame the video games. The tragedy at Sandy Hook wasn’t the first time the graphic gore-filled war games had been linked to a mass shooting. Norwegian murderer Anders Behring Breivik credited the game
Call of Duty
with having helped him in his preparations before his killing spree.
World of Warcraft,
a violent fantasy game, was reportedly one of the video games that James Holmes, the suspect in the Aurora movie theater shooting, frequently played. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went on their shooting rampage at Columbine High School after their parents took away their video game privileges.

Psychologists have voiced concerns that spending prolonged amounts of time surrounded by violent images can blur the line between fiction and reality, possibly leading to devastating consequences. “When we hand a child a controller and put them in the
position of controlling a gun and repeatedly making it shoot human beings, we are desensitizing them to real world violence and making them less empathetic to suffering,” explained Joanne Cantor, an expert on the psychological effects of media and a professor emerita at the University of Madison, Wisconsin.

Not surprisingly, younger children are most at risk of being influenced by America’s addiction to violence. Imagery we see when we’re younger than thirteen leaves a particularly lasting imprint, and children under five are almost completely unable to differentiate fiction from reality, according to Cantor.

Today’s sheer amount of blood and gore in the gaming industry is unprecedented in modern history, experts say. Still, the causes of violence are complex and cannot be simplified by concluding that exposure to violent images alone is the driving reason behind the recent spate of mass shootings.

“There is no evidence that a single violent crime has come from a video game,” said Cheryl K. Olson, a public health researcher and coauthor of
Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do.
“If you look at someone like Adam Lanza, who isolated himself for hours at a time in front of these games, it is clear that it can create a violent situation, but that’s true if you sit in front of anything for too long in isolation.”

Olson’s research showed that an average child in seventh and eighth grade plays at least one violent video game on a regular basis; meanwhile, as the trend of violent video games increases, violent crimes as a whole have decreased. It appears that for normal healthy kids, violent video games have no correlation with real-world violence. On the whole, these well-balanced children have a
surprisingly good understanding of the difference between fantasy and reality, according to Olson.

“In a video game they know it is violence and can act out that violence in a fantasy world, but there is no evidence that video games cause a desensitization to real-world violence,” she explained. “The real abnormal part was how he cut himself off from other people, not that he played violent video games.”

A pattern has emerged in the recent mass killings in Connecticut, Colorado, Norway, and elsewhere, when young men whose social isolation borders on autism become prey to psychotic ideation and, under its influence, commit acts of horrible violence.

“We have created a recipe for a time bomb and Adam Lanza is right in the middle of that pot,” says Dr. Edward Shorter. “Autism and psychosis are two separate illnesses, but they can come together in today’s ultraviolent culture in a horrible way.”

This represents a large cultural shift that began in the 1960s, reflecting the increasing power of violent images that pervade everyday life on the minds of disturbed young men. While overall violent crimes are trending downward, mass shootings are becoming more common. Six of the twelve deadliest shootings to take place in American history have happened in the last six years.

“Young men suffering from delusions a hundred years ago were often more fixated on a perceived slight from a boss at work or their mother,” says Shorter. “Today young men with delusional thinking are filled with violent ideas from culture and video games and have the ability to surround themselves with guns and death in a way that is unprecedented in all of history.

“The more someone with Adam’s symptoms immerses himself
in the world of these superviolent video games, the more they lose context with reality and are prone to act in these violent ways.”

During bouts of isolation, paranoia can begin to set in and those afflicted with autism can lose all sense of reality. “In cases where an adolescent acquires a particular set of delusions they can convince themselves that they can help society by fighting against the oppressor,” said Shorter, who claims that his studies of case records dating back over the past one hundred years shows that the amount of violence and delusional thinking has increased significantly. “In many cases we are talking about people who also believe the world is conspiring to oppress them. It is very popular in right-wing circles among gun lovers who fear the government is conspiring to take their firearms away.

“It’s simple. If someone loses all sense of reality, and isolates themselves in an environment of violence, it’s a very short step to acting it out,” Shorter added. “You throw in access to weapons that can fire off one hundred and fifty shots in five minutes and look out. This gives them the means of acting on their delusions, and acting out those delusions can be a natural progression.”

U
ntil the morning of December 14, Newtown was synonymous with Fairfield Hills State Hospital, a psychiatric hospital located near the center of town. The facility was built in 1931 over 186 rolling green acres situated at the highest point in town. Part of its purpose was to help alleviate the overcrowding at other neighboring mental hospitals. The sixteen buildings, all connected by underground tunnels, were home to more than four thousand patients
when filled to capacity. “Better watch yourself or you’re gonna be sent to Newtown” had become a popular threat in the neighboring areas to anyone exhibiting behavior that strayed too far from the norm.

Beginning in 1955 with the widespread introduction of Thorazine, the first effective antipsychotic medication, America began one of the largest social experiments in history, the deinstitutionalizing of the mentally ill. By the 1960s and 1970s, Fairfield Hills steadily began to lose patients as part of the initiative to shut down large mental health facilities. It wasn’t just happening in Newtown. It signified a dramatic shift going on nationwide to replace long-stay psychiatric hospitals with less isolated community mental health services.

The results were drastic. In 1955 there were 558,239 severely mentally ill patients in the nation’s public psychiatric hospitals. By 1994, despite the population boom, that number had been reduced to 71,619.

On December 8, 1995, Fairfield Hills was closed by the state of Connecticut. The entrances to the underground tunnels that had attracted thrill seekers were sealed. Many rooms of the abandoned buildings are still filled with office equipment, wheelchairs, patient files, and gurneys as if suspended in time. In 2001, the town bought the property from the state and plans are now in place to bulldoze the remaining buildings. A current proposal on the table would replace them with a retail strip and restaurants.

As the mental institutions continued to close, in many states the money slowly began to dry up. In recent years when state budgets
across the country needed trimming, mental health services were often among the first to go. In the past three years, $4.35 billion has been cut from state budgets across the country, according to a report by the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors Research Institute. As states slash funding for treatment, private care is getting increasingly more difficult to find. Many private care facilities don’t take insurance.