Response to Sandy Hook Shooting

Along the rest of the nation I have spent the past week attempting to grapple with the horrific tragedy that plagued the community of Newtown, Connecticut a week ago.  When events like this happen our own life experiences play into how we comprehend such a senseless act and on which aspects of the tragedy we tend to focus.  For instance, a colleague's Facebook status in the days following stated that she was going to focus on the children and heros rather than the evil that walked into the school in all her conversations for the day about the event.  She is from Connecticut and, I assume, needing to honor her community and focus on its good.

First and foremost, I process these events from the lens of someone who has had first hand experience with a similar event that also made national news some 13 years ago.  Sadly, the numbers of individuals who also have this kind of first hand experience is growing exponentially as events such as this one continue to occur with some regularity.  Even so, though we may have experienced similar events each of our reactions can be quite different based on our previous life experiences and general dispositions.  For instance, I have noticed, beginning with the shooters at my own school, that I tend to find compassion, empathy, and some understanding for the killers.  I have curiosity for what leaves an individual to feel so isolated that they feel the need to take their anger out on innocent children.  Even prior to having gone through my own school shooting, I had always been attracted to the underdog, the children that were isolated from their peers. I suppose that is what led me to wanting to work in mental health and foster care, the interest in the psychology behind people's behaviors and helping out the underdog.

My role as a mental health professional also plays into how I processed the event.  I was at work when I heard the news.  As such, I put my guard up, and refused to take it in so I would not break down emotionally.  I subconsciously desensitize myself to such events and as such refused to focus on the stories of the victims as my Connecticut colleague did.  As the week went on, I was able to slowly let it in as the topic came up with patients.  One patient was visibly distressed and preoccupied and had been talking to me about being abused by his peers when he was an adolescent.  The event being at the forefront of my own mind I specifically asked him about thoughts of hurting others as had been done at the elementary school.   He too displayed confusion and disbelief over the event and could not understand how someone could do something like that either.

Several patients have come in the last few days with anxiety about the holiday coming up.  They verbalize feeling isolated and alone during the holidays.  One guy I talked to yesterday talked about compounded stressors, one of which he identified as making him have homicidal thoughts.  He stated, "That's not me, I'm a good person."  He came to the hospital for help.  These are the individuals that want help, the ones with a moral compass that don't want to have these bad thoughts.  But what about all of those people out there that are sitting at home in isolation that don't desire or don't know how to reach out for help?  How do we identify them and provide services for them in order to protect the rest of us?

As a mental health professional and a foster parent I work with individuals that have been through some pretty tough shit.  Many of the kids in the foster care system have endured unspeakable trauma at the hands of their own parents.  If anybody should have a vendetta against the world, a reason to want to shoot up a school, it should be them.  Yet, the shooters tend to be privileged, white, young men who have lived in the lap of luxury in seemingly stable home environments.  My curious side wants to autopsy all their brains and do brain scans of them playing violent video games.  What's missing for them?  Why do they lack value for human life?

Lastly, I process the event through the eyes of teacher and caregiver.  The first classroom I did practicum work in for undergrad was a first grade classroom.  I can't help but picture the many primary schools I have worked in, subbed in, volunteered in.... and imagined how it would have happened.  Would I have been willing to give my life attempting to protect my students?  What about the principal and school psychologist, they could have hidden away in the office and saved themselves?  Did they die for no reason, should they have just stayed put?  Would they support the NRA's suggestion, if there had been a firearm in a safe in the principal's office, could she have done more to stop him?

I think about how all those kids were sitting ducks in all of the classrooms.  Drawn shades, locked doors, and hiding spots in cubbies was not going to stop a man with a gun.  In addition to lock down drills, shouldn't we have evacuation plans for when the danger is in the building as well?  Those 6 kids that slipped out of the second classroom while their teacher and classmates were shot down, they just ran with nowhere to go.  What if there were some kind of safe house to run to?  

But taking in the magnitude of all those little lives that were lost is hardest for me.  Last night, I babysat the 5 year old boy that I was a primary caregiver for when he had been an infant.  It was so hard watching him play and imagining little children like him taken so tragically.  Such joy and interest in life ripped away from their parents and this world.  I imagine all the parents weeping in their child's bedroom having thought they were just sending them off to school like any other day.  Then I'm taken back full circle to having been through the aftermath myself 13 years ago; the suicides, the bomb threats, the media that follow such a senseless act of hatred.  My heart weeps for Newtown and the long road ahead!

So there you have it, my perspective of the Sandy Hook shooting as student, mental health professional, foster parent, teacher, and caregiver.  Through it all I must find trust in the general goodness of mankind.  Though it is challenging, I must not let fear get the best of me (I have not been to a movie theatre since before the shooting over the summer and have found myself scanning crowded places since last weeks shooting).  I must have hope that what I do through all of my roles makes some kind of difference and helps to prevent things like this from happening again.  How about you, which of these perspectives do you most identify with?  What draws your attention when such a senseless act of violence occurs?