INTRODU CTION

Y ou probably don’t know me. But chances are good you’ve read some-
thing I wrote. On December 14, 2012, two days after my thirteen-­
year-­old son—­let’s call him Michael—­was placed in an acute care mental
hospital, twenty-­year-­old Adam Lanza shot his mother, then went to
Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed twenty first graders, six educa-
tors, and himself. My second thought on hearing that horrible news was
probably similar to most people’s first thought. I wanted to rush to my
children’s elementary school, to hold my second-­ grade daughter and
fourth-­grade son in my arms.
But my first thought was something else. My first thought was, “What
if that’s my son someday?” That night, I sat down and wrote my truth. I
admitted my feelings of pain and fear and helplessness about my son’s
condition and my inability to help him. I wrote about the years of missed
diagnoses, ineffective medications, and costly therapies. I expressed my
fear at my son’s unpredictable and sometimes violent rages. I shared the
pain of watching my son handcuffed, in the back of a police car. Then I
posted the essay, entitled “Thinking the Unthinkable,” to my formerly
anonymous mommy blog, The Anarchist Soccer Mom.
Here is some of what I wrote:

9781594632570_PriceOfSilen_FM.indd 13 22711 3/10/14 8:17 AM

 xiv Introduction

This problem is too big for me to handle on my own. Some-

times there are no good options. So you just pray for grace and
trust that in hindsight, it will all make sense.
I am sharing this story because I am Adam Lanza’s mother.
I am Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s mother. I am James
Holmes’s mother. I am Jared Loughner’s mother. I am Seung-­
Hui Cho’s mother. And these boys—­and their mothers—­need
help. In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy
to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness.

I sent my anonymous cry for help screaming into the Internet abyss.
To my surprise, I heard an echo. After I posted the anonymous essay to my
Facebook page and encouraged my friends to share it, they did, and so did
their friends, in record numbers. The next day, my good friend Nathaniel
Hoffman, editor of Boise State University’s online journal the Blue Review
and one of the few people who knew about my blog, called me and said,
“I want this piece. It’s important.” I readily agreed. “And I want you to put
your name on it,” he added. “Until people start putting their names on
these stories, they aren’t real.”
Nate’s request made me pause. I was afraid—­not of what the world
would think—­but of what my friends, my coworkers, my community
would think. Nate was one of just a handful of people who knew about my
ongoing struggles with my son’s mental illness, who knew why I had to
miss work so often or why I sometimes cried in my cubicle or cringed when
my cell phone rang.
But in the end, I agreed to publish the essay with Nate’s suggested
(and better) new title, “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother.” I discovered that
words have power. These were my words, and this is my story.
The Internet response to my cry for help was overwhelming. Before
December 14, 2012, my formerly anonymous blog had about 4,000 hits
total. Now The Anarchist Soccer Mom has had more than 3 million views
and nearly 4,000 comments. The reprint on the Huffington Post (which
picked the story up from the Blue Review and the Seattle Stranger) was one

9781594632570_PriceOfSilen_FM.indd 14 22711 3/10/14 8:17 AM

 Introduction xv

of the most popular articles for days. It received 1.2 million likes on Face-
book (and 323,000 shares), more than 15,000 comments, 16,800 tweets,
and 29,800 e-­mails.
People are still talking about it. I clearly touched a nerve in sharing
my family’s painful experiences with mental illness. Journalists from An-
derson Cooper to Miles O’Brien to Diane Sawyer have asked me to tell our
truth. But not everybody gets it. I have learned through this experience
that stigma, for children and for families who struggle with mental illness
and mental disorders, is still very real.
I’m writing this book for two very different audiences. The first audi-
ence knows mental illness and lives with it every day. For this audience—­
the audience I know best—­mental illness is a blond boy with a butterfly,
a parent putting a meal on the table after a long day at the office, a patient
expressing frustration over a new medication’s unpleasant side effects.
This first audience experiences life with mental illness as “normal.” And
its members—­mothers, fathers, children—­cried out in solidarity with me:
“You shared my story! Thank you for putting into words something I did
not dare to say.”
But I am also writing for a second audience, an audience that is sur-
prised to learn that one in five children in the United States will suffer from
a serious and debilitating mental disorder, an audience that believes mental
illness is something we still shouldn’t talk about except behind closed doors
in private rooms, an audience that is convinced that the sometimes mal-
adaptive behaviors of mental illness are a “choice.” The second audience
knows mental illness as a series of hollow-­eyed young men flashed on
screens above shocking and horrific statistics, body counts in a war with no
named enemy except the enemy within. This audience’s primary under-
standing of mental illness comes from distorted and exaggerated media
portrayals rather than from everyday encounters. This audience is afraid.
Make no mistake: I believe based on my own very real and often
frightening experiences that people with mental illness, when not prop-
erly treated, can be dangerous to themselves and others, with potentially
horrific consequences for themselves, their families, and society. When we

9781594632570_PriceOfSilen_FM.indd 15 22711 3/10/14 8:17 AM

 xvi Introduction

talk about mental illness, we must also talk about violence, no matter how
uncomfortable that conversation is. I shared my own story of frustration
and pain in response to a horrific act of brutality that took the lives of
innocent children and teachers. While it’s true that people who have
mental illness are more likely to suffer violence than perpetrate it, the
never-­ending threat of unpredictable, senseless brutal acts is what makes
the stress of day-­to-­day life with a child who has mental illness similar to
what soldiers in combat experience.
But I also love my son. And I believe that effective treatments exist,
and that even more effective treatments are moving from the margins to
the mainstream every day. As Michael commented after reading a 2013
article in Smithsonian magazine about the promise of 3-­D printing, “Maybe
I’ll invent a teleporter that does more than just transport people to where
they want to go—­it also reads their DNA for mistakes, then fixes those
mistakes and prints out a new, perfect copy of the person.”
Maybe. Or maybe we’ll find gene therapies, or medications that actu-
ally work, or new modes of therapeutic treatment. Maybe we will take the
burden of care for mental illness off the already heavily laden backs of law
enforcement and the criminal justice system. Maybe we’ll learn how to
provide appropriate educations for children with mental disorders. Maybe
we’ll provide meaningful support to families.
I’m writing this book to give a voice to parents of children with men-
tal illness. But I am also writing because I believe that those of us in the
first audience have an obligation to share our experiences with the second
audience. We have to say, “I have mental illness. My child has mental
illness. The woman who cuts my hair or researches my stock-­market port-
folio, the man who bags my groceries, or teaches my children, has mental
illness. And all of us want what any person would want: to live healthy,
happy, productive lives.” By sharing our stories, by putting familiar faces
to a frightening, misunderstood, complicated disease (or rather, a group of
diseases, a cluster of developmental disorders), we can begin to chisel real
change from the massive edifice of stigma that has stood too long in the
way of effective treatments.
Every minority group in history has had to fight for rights, for recog-

9781594632570_PriceOfSilen_FM.indd 16 22711 3/10/14 8:17 AM

 Introduction xvii

nition, for respect. Less than one hundred years ago, women could not
vote. Even twenty years ago, gays were viewed with hostility and suspi-
cion, AIDS as a “homosexual disease.” And yet today, a majority of Amer-
icans support gay marriage, and just four years after Proposition 8
promulgated hate in California, the Supreme Court overturned the De-
fense of Marriage Act and restored equality to a class of citizens that had
been denied majority rights.
But in our country, people who have mental illness are still treated
like second-­class citizens. We treat illness above the neck differently than
from the neck down. Certainly no one advocates a return to the days of
institutionalization. But when the institutions closed, where did people
with mental illness go? The promise of community-­based resources to pro-
vide much-­needed care proved illusory. Instead, today we “treat” those
with mental illness or mental disorders, including our children, in prison.
And in many underprivileged areas, where the stress of poverty is a perva-
sive and persistent trigger for mental illness, a “school-­to-­prison” pipeline
has denied millions of children a meaningful future. The bad institutions
closed and were replaced by something much, much worse, as mental
health advocate and author Pete Earley details so vividly in Crazy: A Fa-
ther’s Search through America’s Mental Health Madness, which uses his son’s
experience with the law to examine how people with mental illness are
mistreated by the criminal justice system.
Then when a tragedy like Newtown happens, former National Rifle
Association president Sandy Froman (and a host of others) can say things
like, “We have to keep guns out of the hands of these insane people.”
Aside: This is not a book about gun rights. I live in Idaho, and we like
to hunt here. But as the parent of a child with mental illness, I would
never own firearms, let alone keep them in my home. In this one respect,
I cannot understand Nancy Lanza, though in other ways, her experiences
with her son Adam are hauntingly familiar to me.
This book is not about keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous
people, though certainly that question deserves exploration. It’s about
making children—­and people—­less dangerous.
The second audience refused to believe what I wrote about my son

9781594632570_PriceOfSilen_FM.indd 17 22711 3/10/14 8:17 AM

 xviii Introduction

when I put my story into the ruthless stockade of public opinion. “You’re
telling me that your only option for your son is jail?” one incredulous re-
porter asked me after my blog post went viral. “There’s no way that can be
true.” It was, and it still is in Idaho and in other states. In fact, a 2013 study
conducted by the George Washington University Center for Health and
Health Care in Schools concluded, “From significant disconnects among
the multiple institutions that serve children and their families to chronic
financial instability, the children’s mental health system is fragile and at-­
risk.” In this book, I’ll introduce psychiatrists, lawyers, law enforcement
officers, educators, and disability rights advocates who can all witness to
the fragility of our current patchwork and costly systems.
I’ll also share stories from other parents who have endured the same
societal blame and stigma for their children’s behavior that I have person-
ally experienced with my own son. When I wrote about my experiences
with my child in my blog, the second audience blamed me, just as psychi-
atrists blamed so-­called Refrigerator Mothers in the 1950s when children
presented with the baffling (then and now) symptoms of autism. As a
mother of four who has seen the Mommy Wars from both fronts—­I was a
stay-­at-­home mother for thirteen years and have subsequently embraced
the world of work with perhaps too much enthusiasm—­I actually under-
stand this criticism well. What loving mother would not examine her own
parenting, from her history of depression to her failed marriage to her
decision to reenter the workforce, and not find herself somehow wanting?
When our children suffer—­whether it’s mental illness or cancer or ­allergies—
we want to know why, and we naturally start with ourselves as the root
cause.
When my painful story went public, I thought that I was the only
mother in America who felt the way I did. But I quickly realized that I was
far from alone in my struggles to find care, support, and understanding for
my son and for myself. This book follows my own journey through the
labyrinth of impassive institutions and jargon-­ridden systems that parents
of children with mental illness and mental disorders must navigate, chas-
ing false promises of hope (this elimination diet, that antipsychotic drug,

9781594632570_PriceOfSilen_FM.indd 18 22711 3/10/14 8:17 AM

 Introduction xix

another behavioral intervention) and finding real promises of treatment

and quality of life.
I have divided the journey into stages, using the loosely chronological
arc of my son’s life to expose the endemic problems with patchwork sys-
tems that form the current pathetic state of children’s mental health ser-
vices. These systems include hospitals, schools, courts, and detention
centers. Each institution requires parents to become versed in an alphabet
soup of acronyms: in education—­IEP, 504, ADA, IDEA, BIP, AT, CD,
DOC, ED, FERPA, FAPE, BA, LRE, OHI, OSEP, OT, PT, SBS; in health
care—­SMI, ACA, PRN, HIPAA, EMR, NIMH, DD, DSM-­5, EBM, EOB.
That’s just for starters.
I have mentioned only in passing things that did not directly affect my
own family and which have been eloquently covered elsewhere—­addiction
and substance abuse, for example, which David Sheff writes about in his
heart-­rending book Beautiful Boy, or depression, for which I could refer the
reader to a host of books, though perhaps my personal favorite is Andrew
Solomon’s The Noonday Demon.
But the journey starts with me. I did not realize it at the time, but my
academic training in Classics (a little Latin, more Greek, and everything
and everyone those two languages and cultures touched through the his-
tory of Western civilization) prepared me well to be the mother of a son
who has both developmental disabilities and a serious mental illness. As a
lifelong student of the humanities, I fear that our increasing reliance on
science for answers about the brain will cause us to lose our appreciation
for the soul. Indeed, the soul’s condition is the traditional purview of the
psychiatrist, who by definition is not a mind healer but a “soul healer.”
Our apprehension of mental illness began within the context of
stigma; history and religion continue to shape our understanding of men-
tal illness and mental disorders, but they also contribute to the “otherness”
of those who have mental illness, perhaps because we are afraid to look in
the mirrors they carry and see ourselves. Freudian analysis, though now
widely discredited, finds its roots in ancient Greek mythology, in tales of
horror that rival our modern media bloodbaths. Consider Oedipus, for

9781594632570_PriceOfSilen_FM.indd 19 22711 3/10/14 8:17 AM

 xx Introduction

example, or Thyestes, who eats his own children, or Medea, the spurned
consort who murders her sons when Jason leaves her for another woman.
As a mother who has faced the stigma of mental illness head-­on, I
believe that we have not quite left the cultural underpinnings that ascribe
mental illness to “evil spirits” or witchcraft. Yet in our society’s worthy
quest to understand and heal the brain, it is important that we don’t forget
the soul—­what makes each of us and our experiences unique—­or relegate
it to a lesser state, viewing the brain as merely another physical organ, to
be treated like the liver, the pancreas, the heart.
I spend perhaps more time than the average person thinking about
theodicy, the problem of evil in the world. This problem is one that reli-
gion seeks to reconcile: if God is good, and if his creations are good, then
where does evil come from? Many modern-­minded people face the prob-
lem of evil and decide to abandon theology altogether. But I have taken
Søren Kierkegaard as my model—­I have tried to make the leap of faith
that Abraham made when he agreed to sacrifice his only son, the miracle
child God gave him in his old age. I conceive of mental illness as an ex-
planation for some of the evil in the world, an explanation, but not an
excuse. Adam Lanza, James Holmes, Jared Loughner, Dylan Klebold,
Aaron Alexis all had explanations for what they did. But explanations are
not excuses.
When I poured out my fears about my own son’s mental illness to the
world, I wrote, “I am Adam Lanza’s mother,” comparing myself to a mother
who knew her son was in trouble but who was unable to get him the help
they both desperately needed, with devastating consequences. I wrote this
book because I don’t want to be Adam Lanza’s mother—­dead. And I don’t
want to be Columbine murderer Dylan Klebold’s mother, alive, but
haunted by a search for answers to impossible questions.
Increasingly, local governments are holding parents accountable for
their children’s moral behavior. But how much control do parents really
have? I keep a copy of the second-­century-­CE Roman emperor Marcus
Aurelius’s Meditations on my nightstand. Aurelius, often called “the last
good emperor,” was a Stoic, always striving to be in harmony with nature.

9781594632570_PriceOfSilen_FM.indd 20 22711 3/10/14 8:17 AM

 Introduction xxi

“Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with
whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart,” he wrote,
words that have given me strength through my most challenging experi-
ences with my son.
Marcus Aurelius’s only surviving son, Commodus, who succeeded him
as emperor, was a monster.
I don’t want to wait for Rome to burn, or for another elementary
school or theater or political gathering or community college to get shot
up, to ask, “Why did this happen?” These horrific acts are the price of si-
lence, the outward manifestation of inward suffering on an epic scale.
I want to ask instead, “How can we help children and families and
communities to become less dangerous right now, today?” By asking those
kinds of questions before another tragedy occurs, we can improve quality
of life. We can decrease dependence on state and federal aid. We can
provide new outlets for creativity and productivity of minds that work
differently from our own and provide much-­needed community support to
children and families. Maybe we can even write a happy ending to the
mental health crisis in America.
But first, we have to tell our stories. This is mine.

9781594632570_PriceOfSilen_FM.indd 21 22711 3/10/14 8:17 AM