In April, 1997, the paths of a group of six troubled teens from Kentucky and a family of Jehovah's Witnesses collided at a roadside rest-stop along Interstate 81. What followed resulted in the death of the entire family, save one survivor, and life in prison for three boys and three girls. Enter Dr. Helen Smith, a forensic psychologist and author, who uses the case in her first documentary, Six as an example of the spectacularly tragic consequences that can occur when every system a child with mental illness encounters fails them:
Keith Daniels: I was surprised that this film is only about an hour long.
Dr. Helen Smith: We purposely did that, because places like HBO, or PBS, when you do things for them they need to be within that one-hour time frame. Plus I was doing it for college classes, because of the book that I wrote The Scarred Heart: Understanding and Identifying Kids Who Kill, and usually college classes are about fifty-five minutes long -- give or take a few minutes. We also didn't want it to be over an hour so that it could be used as a training film, and they generally need something around one-hour.
KD: Do you think this film would be helpful for someone in law enforcement to see?
HS: Yes I do, because I think there are many things that people in law enforcement can do. Number one, I think just knowing to take calls seriously. For example, all of the families and friends of these kids called in to the police before the rampage began, but the police didn't take it seriously. They didn't put out a BOLO, a Be On the Lookout for the car, and I think that happens in a lot of cases of rampage killers. About fifty percent of the time family members know that somebody's on the edge, and they'll call up the police, and a lot of times police don't take things seriously. They might let something slip through the cracks that they need to take more notice of - so I think making the police more aware of the characteristics of these types of kids, and the fact that families do call in and that it's important to take it seriously and do something. I think one of the problems the police have is that they're inundated with so much that it's hard to know which ones to take seriously, but on the other hand, if the police just let things go -- what's the purpose in having them?
KD: A common theme in this story seemed to be problems with family, and parents with mental illness. How much of a factor is that?
HS: Well, in the rampage killings, generally, mental disorder plays a very large part. About fifty percent of the time you'll see someone who is on the edge of having some type of mood disorder, depression, bipolar illness, they may have a personality disorder... A lot of times also I find that these kids have very disturbed thinking. Their thinking isn't like the rest of us. They may see something and misperceive information, they take things much more strongly than the rest of us. Sometimes when people with mental disorder are criticized it doesn't mean as much, so a lot of these kids have sortof a compulsive, ruminating quality about them where they'll think about what somebody said to them over and over and it'll be taken in a way that's much more destructive and produces a lot more aggression than it would in a normal person.
KD: There seems to be more mental illness among children, now, than ever before.
HS: Yes, and in fact there have been surveys... I think it was in USA Today that did this survey, and they found that kids now as opposed to say, twenty years ago, definitely have a lot more incidents of depression and mood disorders like bipolar illness. Kids today are under a lot more stress, and they really admit to a lot more mental health problems than kids did twenty years ago.
KD: And that's not just a lack of diagnosis in the past?
HS: Yeah. Y'know, I think that is part of it. I think we're identifying some of these kids more, so there could be some of that, because we used to just pass over it, but I think even controlling for that the studies do find that there's still a higher incidence of depression. In fact, I think it's something like twenty-five percent of all kids will be depressed sometime before they're twenty years old. I mean, have a major clinical depression before they're twenty.
KD: Do you often see, in the older generation, a discounting of depression? Kindof an "Oh, just pull up your boot-straps." mentality?
HS: Well, sometimes, but you can see it in any case. I think now the younger generation is just more into denial. One group turns their head, and the other group says "just pull yourself up by the boot-straps." Depression is a clinical, medical problem that usually needs to be treated by some type of medication, psychotherapy, or both. In some sense I think the grandparents are right. There are some things in life that maybe pulling up your bootstraps might be a good answer to, but I think when people have clinical depression, or mood disorders like bipolar illness, people don't understand it. Some of these problems are very difficult for an individual to control, and I think then the question has to come to society. When we have people who are mentally disturbed to the point of being violent, or a danger to society, what do we do with them? Our answer seems to be "Well, nothing." People don't want to put the money into mental health that we would need to treat people in an inpatient facility. There seems to be more and more of those across the country closing down. It's not just here in my town -- I know they're [closing down] everywhere. In fact, in Natasha Cornett's town, they had closed one of the floors of a psychiatric wing so that with people with emotional problems really didn't have that many places to go.
KD: So people just end up in jail and costing the state more money.
HS: Right. There's a huge population of people now who are mentally disordered, and mentally ill, in the prisons, and yet they cost a lot more money. It costs a lot more money to stay in a prison than it does in a mental health facility. So, people think that they're saving money, but in actuality we're spending more on the prison system. And we're building more and more prisons.
KD: There was an undertone of religion in this film... like Karen's mother with the Bible, and the religious historian talking about how the kid's viewed Satanism and witchcraft as a protest. How much of a factor do you feel religion was in this story?
HS: Well, the hypocrisy... a lot of these kids came from that whole environment that said you were supposed to be very Christian, which means being kind to people, being good, being open and friendly, and at the same time these kid's lives were shit at home and out in the community. A lot of times what we found in our research... psychologists have found that kids who turn to Satanism or the dark side of the occult generally have very little community nurturance, there is a feeling on their part that the community doesn't care, that in their family life they feel hopeless and powerless, and they turn toward the occult as a way to gain some sort of power, or, feeling that they're a nobody, that they can be somebody powerful. It's also I think just the dark side of the occult. I think there are parts of the occult, like the Wiccan religion, I imagine, that it's supposed to be having to do with nature, and I think they turn more towards Satanism because there's a feeling on their part that it gives some of kind of rube or place where their angry and aggressive feelings are not seen as aberrant but rather are the norm. I think that's really important to these kids, to be seen as having a place that is just for them.
KD: And Satanism is, by definition, the opposite of Christianity.
HS: Yeah, and I think that's just another blow. I think that you become the opposite of what you hate. I think there were a lot of feelings of hatred and anger toward this community, and toward their families that were so religious and preached to them constantly. A lot of these kids said to me "Here's all these people, and they always talk about being good and doing the right thing, and then they go home and beat up their family members." Which a lot of the kids were beaten. So I think there was just this feeling that this whole Christian society was hypocritical and treated them like crap.
KD: What was the story behind Natasha being raped in Louisiana?
HS: It wasn't in the film, but Natasha had gotten married on her 17th birthday to a man named Steve Cornett - that's where she got her last name - and she'd actually gotten married I believe in a witch's cape or something, and they had some kind of occult-type wedding. Anyway, not long after they had got married she was so sick with her bipolar illness, and her problems, that she would stay in her room and she'd want her husband to stay with her and not go to work. One of the problems with people that have some of these disorders is they're very... at one point she was so needy that I think she drove her husband over the edge. So one day he said he was going out to car, packed his stuff up, and left - and she never saw him again. She heard a few months later that he was in New Orleans, and so she went there to try to find him. She was living on the streets and she ended up getting raped there. She didn't talk to me much about it, that was all I understood to have happened.
KD: I've read that you didn't have much contact with the boys in the group.
HS: No, no. Just through their families.
KD: How much do you think the involvement of males changed the outcome?
HS: Well, I think it changed the dynamic in the sense that, with research, we usually see that girls want to hire somebody to do their dirty work. Of course, girls are supposed to be seen in society as real nice and not doing anything to violate people. They're supposed to be the victims. So what girls who are murderers do a lot of the time is that they instigate the murder, they find people, ninety-percent of the time they'll find a man, who can act out the aggressive tendencies that they can only fantasize about. I think that Natasha found Jason, who had very aggressive tendencies and was very impulsive, and would do anything. So I think that girls who want to act out aggressively often will find boys to do that, and the girls will say, while they were the instigator of violence and made it happen, that they're not responsible. "Oh the guy did it.", and that's what they all said, "Well the guys did it, so we're not involved.", but they are involved. To me, in my mind, instigating a murder is just as bad. If you hire a hit-man... I mean, I'm not saying they premeditated to hire these guys, it probably was in their subconscious, that they wanted to act out violently because of their anger, but they didn't want to do it themselves. A lot of times girls don't have the stomach for that. Girls do things, if you know much about women and how they kill, they poison people.
KD: [laughs]
HS: No, no I swear to God there's more serial killer women who're nurses, but society doesn't care about that because they fixate on these male serial killers who go around town bludgeoning everyone. They don't want to deal with the women who poison everybody because that's not big news.
KD: I think I'll make my girlfriend taste the coffee first.
HS: Yeah. [laughs] Women don't kill that often, but they do tend to poison people. They usually kill people they know.
KD: [laughs]
HS: I'm serious! It sounds awful, but there's a great book by Patricia Pearson, she's on the web. Ms. Pearson wrote a book called When She Was Bad, and it's a fantastic book about how women kill and how our society views women - and thinks that women couldn't possibly be murderers, they're always the victim. It's actually not true. Women have a lot of aggressive tendencies, but they act them out in different ways.
KD: Do you feel that the girls [used the guys] in this case? For example Jason didn't strike me as the kind of guy who got laid very often.
HS: I think there was a lot of... the teachers in the movie talked about how everybody gravitated toward Natasha Cornett, and I think that part of that was that she had it set up so she that she had a lot to offer in terms of...who knows? Sex, maybe drugs, and the excitement of the occult. I think that was very intriguing for a lot of guys, especially outcasts and alienated boys that can't get anybody, and figure this was an exciting thing to do. So yeah, I think that definitely the boys were attracted to that kind of behavior.
KD: Weren't some of the girls lesbians?
HS: Well, the girls say they weren't. I've got pictures of them kissing and stuff. They say they were never involved, but then you kindof wonder... not because I have pictures of them kissing, but because even when I saw them in the court footage they look like they were very... I think Karen and Natasha, in fact, they mentioned dating at some point, and of their friends - those two girls who were in the trailer, Tiffany and Tanya - Tanya told me straight out that she was gay and that she dated Natasha. So there must have been some lesbianism going on, but that didn't play a part. Lesbians aren't more likely to go out and kill people. I don't think that contributed to murder, it just contributed to some fun they were having I suppose.
KD: It also seems to fit the profile of the way they wanted to react against the moralism of this town, and shock people.
HS: Right. Yeah, I think there was some of that. They did everything they could. They'd wear shirts with all kinds of Satanist symbols, and I think it was just sortof like "Screw it, if y'all aren't going to accept me we'll have this whole group of outcasts." They had a big group of people, it wasn't just the six, they had a bunch of other friends who were involved in this whole thing too. [Those six] just happened to go on the road trip.
KD: Do you think that this whole thing would've happened without the involvement of a strong, central personality like Natasha?
HS: It's interesting. I think the group dynamic built around her. She was the impetus and the focus of the group. The group probably wouldn't have been together if it wasn't for her. Whether she did that with sex, drugs, or whatever... I think it's more than that. I think even more than that it's the psychology of being alienated herself, and knowing what it was to draw other people to her to be in that group.
KD: Do you feel sorry for these kids in any way?
HS: Well, I felt sorry for the life that they led, but I didn't feel sorry for how they acted out on their aggressive feelings. There are a lot of people who have really shitty lives, but hopefully the ideal would be for them to overcome that and not take innocent people and murder them because of their own feelings of aggression and anger. I think that what they did was a cop out. I felt sorry that they had led that life, but I didn't feel sorry that they were in prison. Certainly not.
KD: What sortof sentence did they get?
HS: They all got life without parole. One of them, Crystal Sturgill, she can maybe be paroled after fifty years.
KD: Do you feel that that was a fitting punishment for this?
HS: As opposed to what? The death penalty? They murdered a whole family. I think one of the problems when you look at this [was that] two of them were juveniles at the time. Natasha and some of the others were eighteen, nineteen, but Karen Howell was 17 and Jason Bryant was 14. Because of that they all did a plea bargain with the prosecutor. The bargain was that the death penalty would be taken off the table for the adults if they all got life in prison, but the juveniles, in Tennessee, would not have been executed. So, it probably would have been to their advantage to say no, but the pressure was on and they didn't want to see their friends killed -- so they all took the plea bargain.
KD: At what point did the plea bargain come in? There's footage of a trial..
HS: That was the sentencing. They'd already said they'd plead guilty, and they left it to the judge to sentence them. At that sentencing hearing that you saw, what happened at the end was that the judge sentenced them all to life without parole. Do I think that was fitting? Sure, as fitting as anything. What do you do with people who go and murder? In the state of Tennessee if you're with someone in the commission of a felony it's as if you did it. People say... the teens themselves still don't understand, they say "Well I didn't pull the trigger." They still don't understand why they should get the same punishment. At any point those kids could have tried to stop it. For example, Dean Mullins and Crystal Sturgill drove their car behind the Lillelids' van on the way to the murder scene, and at any point they could have pulled off and gotten the police or gotten somebody to help.
KD: Or even turned around and gone home.
HS: Yeah. They could've said "Screw it. I'm leaving. I'll just let them be involved, and I'll go home and go to sleep." Even if they didn't want to be involved with the police, which, with kids like that, you could understand why you wouldn't want to call the police. You'd figure it'd just cause you a lot of trouble no matter what you did, you could be blamed for it. I think that was a pretty fitting sentence for them, but I guess what you're asking is about mitigating factors -- because of what happened to them should they have got a reduced sentence?
KD: Yeah, and their age, but I'm finding out more about the story from you.
HS: Than you got to see in the film? The film wasn't really about a whodunit kind of thing, which we could've turned it into. It was more about having people watch what kind of systems the kids go through that don't do anything, the schools and the police, and mental health centers. That was really the idea of it, to show how the systems that kids go through don't do anything to stop them. In most of these cases that I see it's the same kind of thing. Kids will go through the system, but nobody ever addresses their problems or does anything, so kids just on their merry way until inevitably they get in some very serious trouble.
KD: Madonna, Natasha's mother, makes a comment at the end that people in this town ignore the kids until something happens.
HS: They act like kids are important in the sense that the Baby Boomers are a narcissistic group of people who worship youth, but at the same time they really don't know what's going on in these kid's heads a lot of the time. You see that with kids all the time. Their parents don't know what their kids are up to, or what's happening to them emotionally. In some sense we don't treat kids as though they're important because we don't take the time to teach them the lessons they need to learn about the consequences of their actions, and what can happen when you behave and act in a certain manner. In addition, I think we have a particularly hard time treating and dealing with mental health problems in children. There just isn't a whole lot of that. I'm dealing now with some court cases out in some rural areas here, and when I make recommendations there just isn't anyone to fill them. We'll have kids who're depressed and angry, and we don't have anyone... like, we'll have a case worker go out to their house once a month to say "Hi" when what we really need is someone to come out once or twice a week and do an hour of psychotherapy, and some anger management classes, right there in the home.
KD: A lot of these kids seemed like they didn't have one, not even one, responsible adult.
HS: I think you saw that throughout. There wasn't one responsible adult. Even to the point where they met up with a police officer. He was still a person in a position of authority, and he really didn't stop them. I think in some ways these kids are really looking for boundaries, looking for someone to stop them.
KD: Like Joe said, "Somebody needed to catch us."
HS: Yeah, and that's exactly what it is. Kids are looking for boundaries and nobody gives it to them, and they just keep getting more and more outrageous until finally they do something completely crazy. Our society is so completely crazy because then kids are just thrown in jail, but they never, on the lower-end when they were looking for those boundaries, they never had that. I think if you even have one adult in your life, whether that be a schoolteacher, a friend's parent, somebody, who can provide you with that ego. None of those kids had that. They didn't have that ego, that conscious that tells you "Don't do that, it's wrong." Their parents weren't doing it, their teachers weren't doing it, nobody in their life did that for them, and it's important for kids to have somebody who is an authority figure. I think they just laughed at authority figures. It got to the point where it was so ridiculous because their parents were introducing them to drugs, and they're so lame themselves, and then they go to school and the teachers look the other way and say nothing is really going on, and the community doesn't really care, so there was no-one who gave them that sense of what is right and what is wrong.
KD: What do you think could be done? What could be done in the schools, and what could be with mental health?
HS: I think that we need more funding for inpatient treatment, so that when we see these kids like Natasha Cornett that go through the system, that they could be allowed to stay for the period of time it takes. Maybe that would be several months, to stay and get the kind of treatment that they need to learn how to deal with their anger. I also think we don't have enough of what we call Residential Treatment Programs. Nobody can afford them, they're thousands and thousands of dollars a month, even people who are well off can't afford them, but these Residential Treatment Programs will keep kids who are mentally disturbed and have them living in a community, and give them the treatment and medications they need on an ongoing basis. It's particular good for parents who can't handle violent kids, and a lot of parents can't, even normal parents. Sometimes the kids have problems, like a bipolar illness or something, that they really need ongoing supervision. I think we need more that in our society. In the schools, I think that if we were better at identifying some of the factors... a lot of times people think kids who are depressed, if they act angry, teachers and [other] people don't realize that that can be depression. They think if you're depressed you're sitting at home, and the ones that are sitting at home they ignore anyway because they're not bothering anybody. The ones are angry, they sometimes treat as a discipline problem rather than a mental health problem. Sometimes it is just a discipline problem, y'know, but there are times when it really is a mental health issue. For example, one of the kids who shot up a bunch of people at school, Kip Kinkel, he was the kid from Springfield, Oregon. He would sit in class and scream out "I hear these damn voices in my head!", and instead of sending him to the psychiatrist his teacher had him write "I will not say 'damn'." a thousand times. That's how a lot of people deal with this kind of problem.
KD: It seems like the rampage killings have gotten more press lately, but have you studied the history of that? Are there more of them?
HS: There's a slight increase, and there's a slight increase in what we call stranger-to-stranger murders - and I think that's what scares us the most. Used to people were just killing family members, acquaintances, or gang members, but now there's a very slight increase in the stranger-to-stranger murders. That's what the Lillelids would be, that's a stranger, and I think that's what freaks people out. Before, it was like "If I'm not a gang member, and I'm not in one of those bad people's families, I'm safe", but now all of a sudden, when they're killing strangers, it could be me or my family.
KD: Do you think zero-tolerance policies help?
HS: I think that we have to look at everything on an individual level. We can't just group things into black and white, and say that it's either/or. Considering everything from a nail-file to an Uzi a weapon, we're not teaching kids right from wrong. We're not teaching kids that it's much more wrong to bring a gun to school than it is to bring a butter knife to cut your apple, but they're giving the same punishment for these crimes through zero-tolerance. Kids get expelled for a year for either one. I think there needs to be a distinction. We need to give punishments more based on what action was done.
KD: And that contributes to [the kid's] heightened sense of hypocrisy.
HS: Right, exactly.
KD: How much responsibility do parent's have?
HS: I think that parents have some responsibility, of course, but I think that part of the problem we have to look at and ask the question: when we have parents who aren't going to be responsible, we have parents who are sick... most of the parents in this particular case have mental illness themselves. A lot of times they don't know the right way to deal with these kids, or they're so disabled by the medications they're on or by their own mental illness that they can't [take care of their kids], and then we as a society have to say "What are we willing to do for parents who can't deal with their kids?" Are we willing to help out through mental health programs? Through residential treatment for them? Or are we just going to let their dangerous offspring loose into society? We're always going to have parents who can't deal with their kids, and some parents are very good parents. I don't want to give the impression that every parent is like some of these kid's parents. There are some very good parents out there who have violent kids who have mood disorders, bipolar illness, who are schizophrenic. In our society everybody wants to blame the parents because that's the easy scapegoat. We have to take responsibility both as a society and as individuals for what's happening, or we have to say as a society that we're not going to deal with it, if people are violent we'll take the chance that they're going to go out and kill people, we'll take the chance of whatever they do, but we're not going to deal with it. If we turn away from that and say "That's not what we deal with." we can't be surprised when kids and adults act out in a manner that is very self-destructive and damaging to our society.
KD: There must be some politicians who have a keener understanding of what's going on here. There are physicians and lawyers who are congressmen and senators, they know what the solution is...
HS: They don't do anything because that would take a lot of money. The easier thing to do... see, it's free to put zero-tolerance in. It doesn't cost anything. The minute you suggest anything that costs money nobody wants to deal with it, unless it's to build another prison. Somehow that sounds really good; you're really doing something and you're going to punish these awful people, but nobody wants to do anything towards prevention. I think part of it is that if politicians can give the appearance of doing something without actually having to make people responsible. You don't make anyone responsible when you say "Let's put in zero-tolerance." Nobody has to be responsible, they just yell "Anyone who brings a butter knife, anyone who brings X, Y, Z on this list..." You don't have to think, and it's very, very easy, and it can look very effective and hardcore, and I think that's much easier than looking at what's really happening which is that there's this huge complexity of variables of kids who come from all kinds of backgrounds, who interact with school systems who don't give a damn. Think of it, if you blame the school system, and you're a Democrat - do you really want to do that and get the Teacher's Union on your back? Hell no!
KD: Another easy solution is the quasi-censorship of music and video games, because they blame those things too.
HS: I think they blame those things because, again, it looks easy. Nobody's going to be that upset about it. Well, they don't really want to piss off the people in Hollywood, you notice they've kindof held back on that one, but they try to blame guns because it's just so easy. They started backing off that one, of course, because the NRA started coming after them, and when they saw that their constituents didn't like what they were doing they backed off. It's easier to blame things than to look at the complexities of the society and what's really happening. It's much harder to build mental health centers, or keep them open and spend the funding, because they know that's not going to happen, and the constituents really don't want that. They don't want to pay for that. They like the idea of the prisons, but they really don't want to pay for mental health because it's really not that important.
KD: How much do you think gun control would help? Obviously, Natasha had easy access to a gun.
HS: I don't think that really plays a part. People have access to guns all the time and they're not running around killing anyone. Thirty years ago people had guns over their mantel. People used to bring guns to school all the time and people weren't shooting each other. I think it is a cultural phenomenon and not one of easy access to guns. I believe that twenty years ago we had easier access to guns and you didn't see people going out and hauling their guns to school and shooting everyone up. It's a feeling that this is the thing to do in the culture. In Japan there are more suicides than there are homicides in the U.S., it's just the cultural thing to do, you blame yourself if you're in Japan, [you think] you're no good, you kill yourself. Here in the United States you don't blame yourself, you have a sense of entitlement. By God, it's everybody else's fault. If McDonald's made your coffee hot you sue them and you blame them. Here, if you've got problems, somebody did something to you, you just take 'em down.
KD: There's a sense, also, that these types of homicide really are really a form of suicide.
HS: Oh yeah, there's a fine line between suicide and homicide, absolutely. I think with these particular girls you saw how they talked about committing suicide, and in fact a lot of their diaries before the murder talk about committing suicide, so it wasn't something they made up to sound pitiful. It really must have been going on being that they wrote about it in their diaries a year before the murder. Certainly in the school shootings and these kind of rampage killings, there's a huge [percentage] of people who've killed themselves along with it. They've decided "I'm going to kill myself, [but] I'm not going alone. I'm taking the person who did this to me down with me." Also workplace violence, people who go in and kill their girlfriend and then kill themselves, family members... we have that all the time, a guy'll go shoot his family and then kill himself. It is a form of suicide, but it's no longer good enough just to take yourself out, because why should you suffer alone? Our American society tells you that you have to get the other people who did you in, and I do think movies like Carrie probably do... it's not just the movies, but it's contributing to this whole sense of "Never be a victim, and if you are one take everyone down with you. Get revenge on everyone."
KD: You've also said that these kids have a heightened sense of self-esteem.
HS: Yeah, they do. When I test these kids they have a high sense of self-esteem, not low, and they have a sense of entitlement and a feeling of narcissism - that nobody should say anything bad to them, they can't stand being judged in any manner, and there have even been studies [that showed] that when people who are narcissistic are judged, they tend to be more aggressive towards people. I think that's what happened in this case. I think these kids felt like the Lillelids were judging them just as the town had judged them, and that got them so angry that their aggression became worse because of that feeling of being judged and evaluated.
KD: Do you feel that if the media changed the way they cover these rampage killing that it would change anything?
HS: I think it would cut down on some of the copycat incidents, like in the school shootings, but I don't know how much overall it would cut down on them. [Again], I think a lot of this is mental health issues. The New York Times did a study of rampage killers and they found that a lot of them didn't even watch TV, but I do think it would cut down on some of the copycats - where people are sitting at home who are mentally disturbed and they see this on the news, and they see that it makes somebody look really important who used to be a loser. I think it does give people some ideas about things to do.
KD: What would be the most important thing you'd like someone to take away from seeing this film?
HS: I guess what I'd like them to take away is the feeling that "The next time I see a kid, and I feel like there might be something going on, I'm not going to look the other way. I'm going to check into it, and I'm going to lobby for the reopening of our mental health institutes, I'm going to be more active in the schools [and] volunteering." Or just the next time you see your kid's friend... a lot of times you'll notice people will say "Oh, he was over and he said such-and-such but I didn't pay attention to it." Just keep your eyes open and lobby for more mental health. I don't mean this just as a psychologist saying "We need more mental health." because that's ridiculous. I have to say that I don't think people don't trust the judgment of mental health professionals. We've seen so much where somebody will be turned loose from a mental hospital, and then they commit crimes. I think the mental health profession needs more proof of the long-term and short-term effectiveness of our treatments, and I think we need to work with the public and help them to have more of a feeling of security with our methods. I think a lot of people think we're a bunch of flakes or something, and I think they see what the mental institutes do - that they're not always effective - and I think we need to be more effective, and do a more thorough job; not be lazy, not just be run by a bunch of bureaucrats, but have people who can really deal with these kids and teach them better ways of coping with life and depression.
You can order a copy of Six at Six the movie.com, and read more about the phenomena of children who kill at Violent Kids.com
Keith Daniels: I was surprised that this film is only about an hour long.
Dr. Helen Smith: We purposely did that, because places like HBO, or PBS, when you do things for them they need to be within that one-hour time frame. Plus I was doing it for college classes, because of the book that I wrote The Scarred Heart: Understanding and Identifying Kids Who Kill, and usually college classes are about fifty-five minutes long -- give or take a few minutes. We also didn't want it to be over an hour so that it could be used as a training film, and they generally need something around one-hour.
KD: Do you think this film would be helpful for someone in law enforcement to see?
HS: Yes I do, because I think there are many things that people in law enforcement can do. Number one, I think just knowing to take calls seriously. For example, all of the families and friends of these kids called in to the police before the rampage began, but the police didn't take it seriously. They didn't put out a BOLO, a Be On the Lookout for the car, and I think that happens in a lot of cases of rampage killers. About fifty percent of the time family members know that somebody's on the edge, and they'll call up the police, and a lot of times police don't take things seriously. They might let something slip through the cracks that they need to take more notice of - so I think making the police more aware of the characteristics of these types of kids, and the fact that families do call in and that it's important to take it seriously and do something. I think one of the problems the police have is that they're inundated with so much that it's hard to know which ones to take seriously, but on the other hand, if the police just let things go -- what's the purpose in having them?
KD: A common theme in this story seemed to be problems with family, and parents with mental illness. How much of a factor is that?
HS: Well, in the rampage killings, generally, mental disorder plays a very large part. About fifty percent of the time you'll see someone who is on the edge of having some type of mood disorder, depression, bipolar illness, they may have a personality disorder... A lot of times also I find that these kids have very disturbed thinking. Their thinking isn't like the rest of us. They may see something and misperceive information, they take things much more strongly than the rest of us. Sometimes when people with mental disorder are criticized it doesn't mean as much, so a lot of these kids have sortof a compulsive, ruminating quality about them where they'll think about what somebody said to them over and over and it'll be taken in a way that's much more destructive and produces a lot more aggression than it would in a normal person.
KD: There seems to be more mental illness among children, now, than ever before.
HS: Yes, and in fact there have been surveys... I think it was in USA Today that did this survey, and they found that kids now as opposed to say, twenty years ago, definitely have a lot more incidents of depression and mood disorders like bipolar illness. Kids today are under a lot more stress, and they really admit to a lot more mental health problems than kids did twenty years ago.
KD: And that's not just a lack of diagnosis in the past?
HS: Yeah. Y'know, I think that is part of it. I think we're identifying some of these kids more, so there could be some of that, because we used to just pass over it, but I think even controlling for that the studies do find that there's still a higher incidence of depression. In fact, I think it's something like twenty-five percent of all kids will be depressed sometime before they're twenty years old. I mean, have a major clinical depression before they're twenty.
KD: Do you often see, in the older generation, a discounting of depression? Kindof an "Oh, just pull up your boot-straps." mentality?
HS: Well, sometimes, but you can see it in any case. I think now the younger generation is just more into denial. One group turns their head, and the other group says "just pull yourself up by the boot-straps." Depression is a clinical, medical problem that usually needs to be treated by some type of medication, psychotherapy, or both. In some sense I think the grandparents are right. There are some things in life that maybe pulling up your bootstraps might be a good answer to, but I think when people have clinical depression, or mood disorders like bipolar illness, people don't understand it. Some of these problems are very difficult for an individual to control, and I think then the question has to come to society. When we have people who are mentally disturbed to the point of being violent, or a danger to society, what do we do with them? Our answer seems to be "Well, nothing." People don't want to put the money into mental health that we would need to treat people in an inpatient facility. There seems to be more and more of those across the country closing down. It's not just here in my town -- I know they're [closing down] everywhere. In fact, in Natasha Cornett's town, they had closed one of the floors of a psychiatric wing so that with people with emotional problems really didn't have that many places to go.
KD: So people just end up in jail and costing the state more money.
HS: Right. There's a huge population of people now who are mentally disordered, and mentally ill, in the prisons, and yet they cost a lot more money. It costs a lot more money to stay in a prison than it does in a mental health facility. So, people think that they're saving money, but in actuality we're spending more on the prison system. And we're building more and more prisons.
KD: There was an undertone of religion in this film... like Karen's mother with the Bible, and the religious historian talking about how the kid's viewed Satanism and witchcraft as a protest. How much of a factor do you feel religion was in this story?
HS: Well, the hypocrisy... a lot of these kids came from that whole environment that said you were supposed to be very Christian, which means being kind to people, being good, being open and friendly, and at the same time these kid's lives were shit at home and out in the community. A lot of times what we found in our research... psychologists have found that kids who turn to Satanism or the dark side of the occult generally have very little community nurturance, there is a feeling on their part that the community doesn't care, that in their family life they feel hopeless and powerless, and they turn toward the occult as a way to gain some sort of power, or, feeling that they're a nobody, that they can be somebody powerful. It's also I think just the dark side of the occult. I think there are parts of the occult, like the Wiccan religion, I imagine, that it's supposed to be having to do with nature, and I think they turn more towards Satanism because there's a feeling on their part that it gives some of kind of rube or place where their angry and aggressive feelings are not seen as aberrant but rather are the norm. I think that's really important to these kids, to be seen as having a place that is just for them.
KD: And Satanism is, by definition, the opposite of Christianity.
HS: Yeah, and I think that's just another blow. I think that you become the opposite of what you hate. I think there were a lot of feelings of hatred and anger toward this community, and toward their families that were so religious and preached to them constantly. A lot of these kids said to me "Here's all these people, and they always talk about being good and doing the right thing, and then they go home and beat up their family members." Which a lot of the kids were beaten. So I think there was just this feeling that this whole Christian society was hypocritical and treated them like crap.
KD: What was the story behind Natasha being raped in Louisiana?
HS: It wasn't in the film, but Natasha had gotten married on her 17th birthday to a man named Steve Cornett - that's where she got her last name - and she'd actually gotten married I believe in a witch's cape or something, and they had some kind of occult-type wedding. Anyway, not long after they had got married she was so sick with her bipolar illness, and her problems, that she would stay in her room and she'd want her husband to stay with her and not go to work. One of the problems with people that have some of these disorders is they're very... at one point she was so needy that I think she drove her husband over the edge. So one day he said he was going out to car, packed his stuff up, and left - and she never saw him again. She heard a few months later that he was in New Orleans, and so she went there to try to find him. She was living on the streets and she ended up getting raped there. She didn't talk to me much about it, that was all I understood to have happened.
KD: I've read that you didn't have much contact with the boys in the group.
HS: No, no. Just through their families.
KD: How much do you think the involvement of males changed the outcome?
HS: Well, I think it changed the dynamic in the sense that, with research, we usually see that girls want to hire somebody to do their dirty work. Of course, girls are supposed to be seen in society as real nice and not doing anything to violate people. They're supposed to be the victims. So what girls who are murderers do a lot of the time is that they instigate the murder, they find people, ninety-percent of the time they'll find a man, who can act out the aggressive tendencies that they can only fantasize about. I think that Natasha found Jason, who had very aggressive tendencies and was very impulsive, and would do anything. So I think that girls who want to act out aggressively often will find boys to do that, and the girls will say, while they were the instigator of violence and made it happen, that they're not responsible. "Oh the guy did it.", and that's what they all said, "Well the guys did it, so we're not involved.", but they are involved. To me, in my mind, instigating a murder is just as bad. If you hire a hit-man... I mean, I'm not saying they premeditated to hire these guys, it probably was in their subconscious, that they wanted to act out violently because of their anger, but they didn't want to do it themselves. A lot of times girls don't have the stomach for that. Girls do things, if you know much about women and how they kill, they poison people.
KD: [laughs]
HS: No, no I swear to God there's more serial killer women who're nurses, but society doesn't care about that because they fixate on these male serial killers who go around town bludgeoning everyone. They don't want to deal with the women who poison everybody because that's not big news.
KD: I think I'll make my girlfriend taste the coffee first.
HS: Yeah. [laughs] Women don't kill that often, but they do tend to poison people. They usually kill people they know.
KD: [laughs]
HS: I'm serious! It sounds awful, but there's a great book by Patricia Pearson, she's on the web. Ms. Pearson wrote a book called When She Was Bad, and it's a fantastic book about how women kill and how our society views women - and thinks that women couldn't possibly be murderers, they're always the victim. It's actually not true. Women have a lot of aggressive tendencies, but they act them out in different ways.
KD: Do you feel that the girls [used the guys] in this case? For example Jason didn't strike me as the kind of guy who got laid very often.
HS: I think there was a lot of... the teachers in the movie talked about how everybody gravitated toward Natasha Cornett, and I think that part of that was that she had it set up so she that she had a lot to offer in terms of...who knows? Sex, maybe drugs, and the excitement of the occult. I think that was very intriguing for a lot of guys, especially outcasts and alienated boys that can't get anybody, and figure this was an exciting thing to do. So yeah, I think that definitely the boys were attracted to that kind of behavior.
KD: Weren't some of the girls lesbians?
HS: Well, the girls say they weren't. I've got pictures of them kissing and stuff. They say they were never involved, but then you kindof wonder... not because I have pictures of them kissing, but because even when I saw them in the court footage they look like they were very... I think Karen and Natasha, in fact, they mentioned dating at some point, and of their friends - those two girls who were in the trailer, Tiffany and Tanya - Tanya told me straight out that she was gay and that she dated Natasha. So there must have been some lesbianism going on, but that didn't play a part. Lesbians aren't more likely to go out and kill people. I don't think that contributed to murder, it just contributed to some fun they were having I suppose.
KD: It also seems to fit the profile of the way they wanted to react against the moralism of this town, and shock people.
HS: Right. Yeah, I think there was some of that. They did everything they could. They'd wear shirts with all kinds of Satanist symbols, and I think it was just sortof like "Screw it, if y'all aren't going to accept me we'll have this whole group of outcasts." They had a big group of people, it wasn't just the six, they had a bunch of other friends who were involved in this whole thing too. [Those six] just happened to go on the road trip.
KD: Do you think that this whole thing would've happened without the involvement of a strong, central personality like Natasha?
HS: It's interesting. I think the group dynamic built around her. She was the impetus and the focus of the group. The group probably wouldn't have been together if it wasn't for her. Whether she did that with sex, drugs, or whatever... I think it's more than that. I think even more than that it's the psychology of being alienated herself, and knowing what it was to draw other people to her to be in that group.
KD: Do you feel sorry for these kids in any way?
HS: Well, I felt sorry for the life that they led, but I didn't feel sorry for how they acted out on their aggressive feelings. There are a lot of people who have really shitty lives, but hopefully the ideal would be for them to overcome that and not take innocent people and murder them because of their own feelings of aggression and anger. I think that what they did was a cop out. I felt sorry that they had led that life, but I didn't feel sorry that they were in prison. Certainly not.
KD: What sortof sentence did they get?
HS: They all got life without parole. One of them, Crystal Sturgill, she can maybe be paroled after fifty years.
KD: Do you feel that that was a fitting punishment for this?
HS: As opposed to what? The death penalty? They murdered a whole family. I think one of the problems when you look at this [was that] two of them were juveniles at the time. Natasha and some of the others were eighteen, nineteen, but Karen Howell was 17 and Jason Bryant was 14. Because of that they all did a plea bargain with the prosecutor. The bargain was that the death penalty would be taken off the table for the adults if they all got life in prison, but the juveniles, in Tennessee, would not have been executed. So, it probably would have been to their advantage to say no, but the pressure was on and they didn't want to see their friends killed -- so they all took the plea bargain.
KD: At what point did the plea bargain come in? There's footage of a trial..
HS: That was the sentencing. They'd already said they'd plead guilty, and they left it to the judge to sentence them. At that sentencing hearing that you saw, what happened at the end was that the judge sentenced them all to life without parole. Do I think that was fitting? Sure, as fitting as anything. What do you do with people who go and murder? In the state of Tennessee if you're with someone in the commission of a felony it's as if you did it. People say... the teens themselves still don't understand, they say "Well I didn't pull the trigger." They still don't understand why they should get the same punishment. At any point those kids could have tried to stop it. For example, Dean Mullins and Crystal Sturgill drove their car behind the Lillelids' van on the way to the murder scene, and at any point they could have pulled off and gotten the police or gotten somebody to help.
KD: Or even turned around and gone home.
HS: Yeah. They could've said "Screw it. I'm leaving. I'll just let them be involved, and I'll go home and go to sleep." Even if they didn't want to be involved with the police, which, with kids like that, you could understand why you wouldn't want to call the police. You'd figure it'd just cause you a lot of trouble no matter what you did, you could be blamed for it. I think that was a pretty fitting sentence for them, but I guess what you're asking is about mitigating factors -- because of what happened to them should they have got a reduced sentence?
KD: Yeah, and their age, but I'm finding out more about the story from you.
HS: Than you got to see in the film? The film wasn't really about a whodunit kind of thing, which we could've turned it into. It was more about having people watch what kind of systems the kids go through that don't do anything, the schools and the police, and mental health centers. That was really the idea of it, to show how the systems that kids go through don't do anything to stop them. In most of these cases that I see it's the same kind of thing. Kids will go through the system, but nobody ever addresses their problems or does anything, so kids just on their merry way until inevitably they get in some very serious trouble.
KD: Madonna, Natasha's mother, makes a comment at the end that people in this town ignore the kids until something happens.
HS: They act like kids are important in the sense that the Baby Boomers are a narcissistic group of people who worship youth, but at the same time they really don't know what's going on in these kid's heads a lot of the time. You see that with kids all the time. Their parents don't know what their kids are up to, or what's happening to them emotionally. In some sense we don't treat kids as though they're important because we don't take the time to teach them the lessons they need to learn about the consequences of their actions, and what can happen when you behave and act in a certain manner. In addition, I think we have a particularly hard time treating and dealing with mental health problems in children. There just isn't a whole lot of that. I'm dealing now with some court cases out in some rural areas here, and when I make recommendations there just isn't anyone to fill them. We'll have kids who're depressed and angry, and we don't have anyone... like, we'll have a case worker go out to their house once a month to say "Hi" when what we really need is someone to come out once or twice a week and do an hour of psychotherapy, and some anger management classes, right there in the home.
KD: A lot of these kids seemed like they didn't have one, not even one, responsible adult.
HS: I think you saw that throughout. There wasn't one responsible adult. Even to the point where they met up with a police officer. He was still a person in a position of authority, and he really didn't stop them. I think in some ways these kids are really looking for boundaries, looking for someone to stop them.
KD: Like Joe said, "Somebody needed to catch us."
HS: Yeah, and that's exactly what it is. Kids are looking for boundaries and nobody gives it to them, and they just keep getting more and more outrageous until finally they do something completely crazy. Our society is so completely crazy because then kids are just thrown in jail, but they never, on the lower-end when they were looking for those boundaries, they never had that. I think if you even have one adult in your life, whether that be a schoolteacher, a friend's parent, somebody, who can provide you with that ego. None of those kids had that. They didn't have that ego, that conscious that tells you "Don't do that, it's wrong." Their parents weren't doing it, their teachers weren't doing it, nobody in their life did that for them, and it's important for kids to have somebody who is an authority figure. I think they just laughed at authority figures. It got to the point where it was so ridiculous because their parents were introducing them to drugs, and they're so lame themselves, and then they go to school and the teachers look the other way and say nothing is really going on, and the community doesn't really care, so there was no-one who gave them that sense of what is right and what is wrong.
KD: What do you think could be done? What could be done in the schools, and what could be with mental health?
HS: I think that we need more funding for inpatient treatment, so that when we see these kids like Natasha Cornett that go through the system, that they could be allowed to stay for the period of time it takes. Maybe that would be several months, to stay and get the kind of treatment that they need to learn how to deal with their anger. I also think we don't have enough of what we call Residential Treatment Programs. Nobody can afford them, they're thousands and thousands of dollars a month, even people who are well off can't afford them, but these Residential Treatment Programs will keep kids who are mentally disturbed and have them living in a community, and give them the treatment and medications they need on an ongoing basis. It's particular good for parents who can't handle violent kids, and a lot of parents can't, even normal parents. Sometimes the kids have problems, like a bipolar illness or something, that they really need ongoing supervision. I think we need more that in our society. In the schools, I think that if we were better at identifying some of the factors... a lot of times people think kids who are depressed, if they act angry, teachers and [other] people don't realize that that can be depression. They think if you're depressed you're sitting at home, and the ones that are sitting at home they ignore anyway because they're not bothering anybody. The ones are angry, they sometimes treat as a discipline problem rather than a mental health problem. Sometimes it is just a discipline problem, y'know, but there are times when it really is a mental health issue. For example, one of the kids who shot up a bunch of people at school, Kip Kinkel, he was the kid from Springfield, Oregon. He would sit in class and scream out "I hear these damn voices in my head!", and instead of sending him to the psychiatrist his teacher had him write "I will not say 'damn'." a thousand times. That's how a lot of people deal with this kind of problem.
KD: It seems like the rampage killings have gotten more press lately, but have you studied the history of that? Are there more of them?
HS: There's a slight increase, and there's a slight increase in what we call stranger-to-stranger murders - and I think that's what scares us the most. Used to people were just killing family members, acquaintances, or gang members, but now there's a very slight increase in the stranger-to-stranger murders. That's what the Lillelids would be, that's a stranger, and I think that's what freaks people out. Before, it was like "If I'm not a gang member, and I'm not in one of those bad people's families, I'm safe", but now all of a sudden, when they're killing strangers, it could be me or my family.
KD: Do you think zero-tolerance policies help?
HS: I think that we have to look at everything on an individual level. We can't just group things into black and white, and say that it's either/or. Considering everything from a nail-file to an Uzi a weapon, we're not teaching kids right from wrong. We're not teaching kids that it's much more wrong to bring a gun to school than it is to bring a butter knife to cut your apple, but they're giving the same punishment for these crimes through zero-tolerance. Kids get expelled for a year for either one. I think there needs to be a distinction. We need to give punishments more based on what action was done.
KD: And that contributes to [the kid's] heightened sense of hypocrisy.
HS: Right, exactly.
KD: How much responsibility do parent's have?
HS: I think that parents have some responsibility, of course, but I think that part of the problem we have to look at and ask the question: when we have parents who aren't going to be responsible, we have parents who are sick... most of the parents in this particular case have mental illness themselves. A lot of times they don't know the right way to deal with these kids, or they're so disabled by the medications they're on or by their own mental illness that they can't [take care of their kids], and then we as a society have to say "What are we willing to do for parents who can't deal with their kids?" Are we willing to help out through mental health programs? Through residential treatment for them? Or are we just going to let their dangerous offspring loose into society? We're always going to have parents who can't deal with their kids, and some parents are very good parents. I don't want to give the impression that every parent is like some of these kid's parents. There are some very good parents out there who have violent kids who have mood disorders, bipolar illness, who are schizophrenic. In our society everybody wants to blame the parents because that's the easy scapegoat. We have to take responsibility both as a society and as individuals for what's happening, or we have to say as a society that we're not going to deal with it, if people are violent we'll take the chance that they're going to go out and kill people, we'll take the chance of whatever they do, but we're not going to deal with it. If we turn away from that and say "That's not what we deal with." we can't be surprised when kids and adults act out in a manner that is very self-destructive and damaging to our society.
KD: There must be some politicians who have a keener understanding of what's going on here. There are physicians and lawyers who are congressmen and senators, they know what the solution is...
HS: They don't do anything because that would take a lot of money. The easier thing to do... see, it's free to put zero-tolerance in. It doesn't cost anything. The minute you suggest anything that costs money nobody wants to deal with it, unless it's to build another prison. Somehow that sounds really good; you're really doing something and you're going to punish these awful people, but nobody wants to do anything towards prevention. I think part of it is that if politicians can give the appearance of doing something without actually having to make people responsible. You don't make anyone responsible when you say "Let's put in zero-tolerance." Nobody has to be responsible, they just yell "Anyone who brings a butter knife, anyone who brings X, Y, Z on this list..." You don't have to think, and it's very, very easy, and it can look very effective and hardcore, and I think that's much easier than looking at what's really happening which is that there's this huge complexity of variables of kids who come from all kinds of backgrounds, who interact with school systems who don't give a damn. Think of it, if you blame the school system, and you're a Democrat - do you really want to do that and get the Teacher's Union on your back? Hell no!
KD: Another easy solution is the quasi-censorship of music and video games, because they blame those things too.
HS: I think they blame those things because, again, it looks easy. Nobody's going to be that upset about it. Well, they don't really want to piss off the people in Hollywood, you notice they've kindof held back on that one, but they try to blame guns because it's just so easy. They started backing off that one, of course, because the NRA started coming after them, and when they saw that their constituents didn't like what they were doing they backed off. It's easier to blame things than to look at the complexities of the society and what's really happening. It's much harder to build mental health centers, or keep them open and spend the funding, because they know that's not going to happen, and the constituents really don't want that. They don't want to pay for that. They like the idea of the prisons, but they really don't want to pay for mental health because it's really not that important.
KD: How much do you think gun control would help? Obviously, Natasha had easy access to a gun.
HS: I don't think that really plays a part. People have access to guns all the time and they're not running around killing anyone. Thirty years ago people had guns over their mantel. People used to bring guns to school all the time and people weren't shooting each other. I think it is a cultural phenomenon and not one of easy access to guns. I believe that twenty years ago we had easier access to guns and you didn't see people going out and hauling their guns to school and shooting everyone up. It's a feeling that this is the thing to do in the culture. In Japan there are more suicides than there are homicides in the U.S., it's just the cultural thing to do, you blame yourself if you're in Japan, [you think] you're no good, you kill yourself. Here in the United States you don't blame yourself, you have a sense of entitlement. By God, it's everybody else's fault. If McDonald's made your coffee hot you sue them and you blame them. Here, if you've got problems, somebody did something to you, you just take 'em down.
KD: There's a sense, also, that these types of homicide really are really a form of suicide.
HS: Oh yeah, there's a fine line between suicide and homicide, absolutely. I think with these particular girls you saw how they talked about committing suicide, and in fact a lot of their diaries before the murder talk about committing suicide, so it wasn't something they made up to sound pitiful. It really must have been going on being that they wrote about it in their diaries a year before the murder. Certainly in the school shootings and these kind of rampage killings, there's a huge [percentage] of people who've killed themselves along with it. They've decided "I'm going to kill myself, [but] I'm not going alone. I'm taking the person who did this to me down with me." Also workplace violence, people who go in and kill their girlfriend and then kill themselves, family members... we have that all the time, a guy'll go shoot his family and then kill himself. It is a form of suicide, but it's no longer good enough just to take yourself out, because why should you suffer alone? Our American society tells you that you have to get the other people who did you in, and I do think movies like Carrie probably do... it's not just the movies, but it's contributing to this whole sense of "Never be a victim, and if you are one take everyone down with you. Get revenge on everyone."
KD: You've also said that these kids have a heightened sense of self-esteem.
HS: Yeah, they do. When I test these kids they have a high sense of self-esteem, not low, and they have a sense of entitlement and a feeling of narcissism - that nobody should say anything bad to them, they can't stand being judged in any manner, and there have even been studies [that showed] that when people who are narcissistic are judged, they tend to be more aggressive towards people. I think that's what happened in this case. I think these kids felt like the Lillelids were judging them just as the town had judged them, and that got them so angry that their aggression became worse because of that feeling of being judged and evaluated.
KD: Do you feel that if the media changed the way they cover these rampage killing that it would change anything?
HS: I think it would cut down on some of the copycat incidents, like in the school shootings, but I don't know how much overall it would cut down on them. [Again], I think a lot of this is mental health issues. The New York Times did a study of rampage killers and they found that a lot of them didn't even watch TV, but I do think it would cut down on some of the copycats - where people are sitting at home who are mentally disturbed and they see this on the news, and they see that it makes somebody look really important who used to be a loser. I think it does give people some ideas about things to do.
KD: What would be the most important thing you'd like someone to take away from seeing this film?
HS: I guess what I'd like them to take away is the feeling that "The next time I see a kid, and I feel like there might be something going on, I'm not going to look the other way. I'm going to check into it, and I'm going to lobby for the reopening of our mental health institutes, I'm going to be more active in the schools [and] volunteering." Or just the next time you see your kid's friend... a lot of times you'll notice people will say "Oh, he was over and he said such-and-such but I didn't pay attention to it." Just keep your eyes open and lobby for more mental health. I don't mean this just as a psychologist saying "We need more mental health." because that's ridiculous. I have to say that I don't think people don't trust the judgment of mental health professionals. We've seen so much where somebody will be turned loose from a mental hospital, and then they commit crimes. I think the mental health profession needs more proof of the long-term and short-term effectiveness of our treatments, and I think we need to work with the public and help them to have more of a feeling of security with our methods. I think a lot of people think we're a bunch of flakes or something, and I think they see what the mental institutes do - that they're not always effective - and I think we need to be more effective, and do a more thorough job; not be lazy, not just be run by a bunch of bureaucrats, but have people who can really deal with these kids and teach them better ways of coping with life and depression.
You can order a copy of Six at Six the movie.com, and read more about the phenomena of children who kill at Violent Kids.com
VIEW 24 of 24 COMMENTS
I, however, especially question the idea of an increase in the amount of Residential treatment programs... Personally, I spent a majority of my high school years in and out of some sort of in-patient treatment for clinical depression. A fair amount of that time was spent in "acute care" type places, and it took me attemtping suicide for my parents to send me to a residental treatment center. Interestingly enough, one of the biggest factors in my decision to try to kill myself is that I knew I could no longer "manage my depression" on my own and that the only option left in my parents eyes would be to send me to an RTC... basically I knew that in-patient was shitty and never did a god damn thing to help and in some cases set me further back, and that meant residential treatment would be fucking hell (and it was ten times worse than I had expected). Theres much more to the story, but personally, I've seen first hand how tragically flawed much (of what I know) of our mental health facilities/practices are.
...I could go on forever about this topic, but I just feel like before we start making more residential treatment centers and residential programs and so forth... professionals need to take a look at changing aspects of how they look at/practice psychology and pyschiatry first.
Sorry, a bit off topic and kinda out there, but I had to say something...
Kevin