It is NOT the time to talk about mental illness

Of all the online reactions to the Newtown horror, the most disturbing was probably the blog post written by Liza Long, the mother of a 13-year-old boy with an autistic spectrum disorder, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and oppositional defiant disorder – highly intelligent but given to unpredictable aggression and violent threats. The post is called ‘I am Adam Lanza’s mother’ and its message is discomforting to say the least. Long suspects that her own son is, like Adam Lanza, a potential school massacrist. She thinks he should be incarcerated. ‘It is time to talk about mental illness,’ she concludes.

Inevitably, the blog went ‘viral’. Even more inevitably, there was a backlash. Sarah Kendzior, another mother blogger, did some research into Long (by reading more of her blog) and suggested that perhaps she too suffered from a mental illness .

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Finally, Long and Kendzior contacted each other directly, decided that they didn’t want to be part of a ‘mommy war’, and released a joint statement about the urgent need for ‘national conversation’ about mental health.