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The day after the attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School (December 14, 2012), I wrote a blog comparing what was known about Adam Lanza in the immediate aftermath of his attack to what we know about other rampage school shooters. I concluded that of the three types of shooters I have identified—psychopathic, psychotic, and traumatized—Lanza most resembled psychotic shooters.
In the years since the attack, more information has come to light. There have been official reports (see www.schoolshooters.info), as well as the online detective work of Reed Coleman, who has tracked down Lanza’s internet presence on multiple sites. When I wrote my book, School Shooters: Understanding High School, College, and Adult Perpetrators, I argued that Lanza could best be understood as having undiagnosed schizophrenia. What was missing, however, was clear evidence of psychotic symptoms: e.g., hallucinations and/or delusions.
A few weeks ago, however, Reed Coleman published a blog titled, “Exclusive: Private Messages sent by the Sandy Hook shooter.” Coleman quotes two messages that Lanza sent to people he knew from online forums. One of these messages includes a description of what appears to have been his first full-blown psychotic experience. Before this incident occurred, however, Lanza had been having “images of distorted faces flashing through my mind.” He said that he would get “slightly paranoid over them” and search his room to make sure no one was there. These seem to have been the first onset of hallucinations that eventually led to a more significant psychotic episode.
Here is what Lanza wrote:
“Getting back to the subject of paranoia — those images were the worst ‘hallucinations’ I had experienced until a couple of weeks ago late one night when I was getting very tired. The incident was so surreal that I only a remember a small amount of the details. Basically, I began to ‘see’ many different things. Although I knew that none of it was actually real, it came as close to being real as it could for me without it being physically tangible. I heard screaming around me, and I had an overwhelming sense that there was someone dead behind me. I kept seeing silhouettes of flickering people everywhere. I felt like I had to cry. The entire ordeal persisted for about fifteen minutes and sort of faded away. Prior to it happening, I had never had that sort of delusional hysteria before. It was possibly the strangest thing I’ve ever experienced.”
Even though he said he only remembered “a small amount of the details,” he mentioned both auditory and visual hallucinations. This is the best evidence we have that Lanza was psychotic. The date of his message was October 23, 2010, which was over two years before his attack. During those two years his functioning deteriorated: he stopped going to college, cut off contact with his father and brother, and became increasingly reclusive. Perhaps his psychotic symptoms became more frequent and/or more severe.
Though Lanza was a very complicated person, the combination of his poverty of speech, flattened affect, inability to function in any major life domain (work, education, love, friendship, etc.), paranoia, and hallucinations, all point to a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
Even if Lanza did have schizophrenia, however, this alone would not explain his attack. People suffering from schizophrenia typically are no more likely to be violent than the general population. Nonetheless, efforts to make sense of who he was and what he did are not likely to go very far without taking into account the disturbing experiences he had—most of which we will presumably never know about.
