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“Hurt people, hurt people” – The Sanctuary Model
Everyone was horrified to hear that an adolescent, Adam Lanza, walked into an elementary school and killed 20 children and 6 adults as well as killing himself. Many people have offered their view as to what was wrong with Adam and about what we could have done and should do to prevent these incidents. In this episode I’ll share my concerns over what I think is going wrong with community mental health centers and why they probably would NOT have been able to help Adam, which is the extraordinary focus on productivity – the application of the factory model – to current mental health settings. I also introduce one approach that might help if more mental health centers adopted it, which is the “Sanctury Model”.
Resources for this Episode
- Here’s where you can learn more about the Sanctuary Model
- The Andrus Center for Children is where the Sanctuary Model was developed
- Green Chimneys is a residential facility that utilizes the Sanctuary model, as well as incorporating “animal assisted therapy”. A fascinating place.
- Top 10 Myths About Mass Shootings is an article that provides sobering facts about incidences of this type
- Anatomy of a Murder-Suicide. A fascinating article by Andrew Solomon, author of “Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity.”
- Are video games really the villains in our violent age?
I am a student at a college and at the moment I am taking psychology. What hit home is when you said ” you may know a child like this” and how most of us tend to stay out of others personal affairs. I know of a little girl that has been through some type of trauma and may still be going through the same type of trauma and she is only 5. The city has been involved in her case at one point but now the mother has full custody of her now but there are still symptoms showing that this little girl is being traumatized by another person. I have went around and around in my head trying to figure out a way to help this child. I know reporting it would be step 1 in to getting her out of the environment and into a safer one, maybe, the reason I say maybe is because “foster homes” or the “state” may not be as safe as some of us think. There are more cases of abuse in foster homes than we think. So what is the best way to go about this to help this child? I know getting her out of the home is a step but what happens after that? Will she get the proper treatment she needs to heal her wounds? Will she ever be able to have a “normal” relationship with anyone? She is just so young and has already had to endure so much pain.
Sir,
Thank you for another thought-provoking podcast. I definitely think that the focus of society (and our government) is not where it should be after the shootings at Newtown. Here we are, over a month after the shootings, and gun control is on every news website, radio and television broadcast that you can find. No mention of mental health. It truly amazes me and makes me wonder if we are doomed to repeat this cycle. I wonder how many people it will take to redirect this issue…maybe it is much less expensive to address gun control instead of mental health care?
v/r,
Sarah R.
Ashley,
There have been studies showing that if the child has 1 adult who is there for them,not necessarily a parent it tends to help them a lot.
From the podcast All In the Mind that has an episode on this , about epigenetics
“So it varies, it depends on what kind of other support is there along with the stress. They are seeing in a lot of studies that a family or a child can be in actually fairly extreme circumstances sometimes and have one of these variants but if they have one or two really important sources of consistency and support in their life from adults it can almost erase all the other vulnerability. One really neat study that was from 2004 by a Yale psychiatrist named Joan Kaufman looked at badly abused kids in New York State, these were kids that were so badly abused by their parents that the state took them away from the parent for at least a time. They ran two filters on this population of kids – one was the serotonin transporter gene and when they did that they found just what you would expect from previous studies. If the kid had a short version of this serotonin transporter gene they were much more likely to have mental health problems as a result of the abuse they’d suffered.
But then they ran one other filter on these kids. Someone had asked them a number of questions and one of the questions was do you have social support in your life? And in this case it was to find as an adult outside the family in the immediate home who they trusted, felt they could turn to for support and saw at least a couple of times a month. This could be an aunt, someone at school, someone down the hall, just another adult they trusted and could go to and felt they were there. And if the answer to that question was yes from these grade school children it erased about 80% of the combined risk of the abuse, these kids are usually beaten, of the abuse and the short serotonin transporter gene.”
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/orchids-dandelions-genes/4420952
If anybody is interested
Drs. Oldham, Breiling, Pandya andthers from the Menninger Faculty talk about this tradgedy
http://www.borderlinepersonalitydisorder.com/blog/news/special-call-in-discussion-tragedy-in-newtown-ct-dec-18th-8pm-to-9pm-est/
They discuss :
the media
advice for families
violence and mental illness,psychosis
video games
community
prevention