Parents:Mental health care needs fixing

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) - They have rigged their bedroom door to make noise when it's opened, for fear their mentally ill son will try to kill them in their sleep.

Their other children know when to lock themselves in another room. They've locked kitchen knives in their safe.

"At the worst of it last year, I had to come to terms with the idea that I may have to kill my own child in order to protect my family," said the boy's dad, Paul Ledford.

When Paul and Tammy Ledford look at images of Adam Lanza -- the 20-year-old who killed 26 people in a Connecticut elementary school -- they are filled with fear about their own son, who is 13.

They hope that their vigilance and their faith in God will keep him from doing something terrible.

"I feel like that could be us; I pray that it is never us," his mom said.

But, they said, they need help because the mental health system is failing.

"Guns are not the problem in this shooting; the mental illness is the problem," said Tammy Ledford.

"It's to everyone's benefit that mental health gets addressed and that we find ways to fix the system and we find ways to do more research, get new medications and learn new ways to help these people."

The boy's father is an attorney and concealed weapons instructor. He said he has guns but keeps them locked in a safe where his son cannot get them.

Their son, an eighth-grader at a West Michigan special education school, usually is sweet. He likes to help cook.

But he explodes without notice -- throwing desks, chairs, scissors; kicking and punching.

"He says he'll blow the school up," his mom said. "He says he'll blow people up, he says he'll kill people, he says he'll kill us, he says he'll kill his siblings, he says he'll kill himself."

Three times this year, they've hospitalized him at Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services.

"I had this beautiful baby boy, and he seemed normal and he had a twinkle in his eye, and I just wanted him to grow up and be a normal kid, have a normal life," his mom said.

But, she said, it wasn't long before they noticed something was wrong.

"At the age of 6, he had a suicide plan," she said.

His mom, who is writing a book about the family's experience, said doctors have treated him for a long list of mental illnesses -- bipolar disorder, sensory integration disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, ADHD, motor visual and auditory processing disorder.

It's also possible he has oppositional defiance disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and that he's borderline autistic, she said.

Even today, his mom had to rush to school to pick him up after he became agitated.

"I can hear fear in the voice of the people working with him sometimes when they call me, telling me I need to come get him right away."

But his parents said it takes too long to get help, and that drugs don't always help.

"We are running out of drugs to try, and he's only 13 years old," his mom said.

Insurance covered 20 of the 30 days at Pine Rest this year. Doctors want him to stay for 6 months, but at $1,000 or so a day, they can't afford it, they said.

"It definitely needs fixing," Tammy Ledford said. "Mentally ill people are a public health threat. They need to be taken care of. They don't choose to be mentally ill. They don't want to be mentally ill."