Post by Joanna on Aug 30, 2016 23:19:18 GMT -5
Why Parents Kill their Children
Healthy people don’t just kill their kids. To get to that point, a parent’s mental well-being often spends a long time in decline. And often, no one notices. So when tragedy arises – like the case of a Houston woman who allegedly drowned her two children Friday, August 12, the community reels with confusion. How could a parent kill the very person to whom he/she gave life?
Mothers are no more likely than fathers to kill their kids. These killers exhibit delusion or irrational anguish that often goes unaddressed by mental health care providers. “A person who is psychotic, it’s not normally a constant mindset. It can ebb and flow. It can be mild, it can be severe,” said George Parnham, a Houston defense attorney who has represented five women accused of killing their kids, including Andrea Yates, whose 2001 drowning of her five kids in Houston drew national attention. “It’s just a very difficult situation to understand, but someone has to do it in order to properly represent the mother.”
The most authoritative classification of child murders remains a 1969 study published by Phillip Resnick in the American Journal of Psychiatry, in which he sorted the crimes into five categories.
• Altruistic: A parent sees him/herself acting in the child’s best interest by killing it. The man or woman generally believes the child is doomed to a torturous life, sometimes from self-perceived bad parenting.
• Acutely psychotic: A parent kills without a rational motive.
• Unwanted child: A parent perceives he/she will benefit from the loss of the child, including through insurance payments or to accommodate a romantic partner who doesn’t want kids.
• Accidental: Occurs often as an unintentional result of abuse that was never meant to kill.
• Spouse revenge: A parent wants to inflict pain on his/her current or former spouse, often as a reaction to cheating.
Resnick, now a professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University, said a parent who kills their child, or children, is “much more likely to be someone who is a good citizen in a mental health crisis than a criminal type.”
Altruism was the most common motivator in Resnick’s study. These parents were just trying to help. Substantial delusion plays into making murder feel like an act of good. For example, Andrea Yates cited altruism when she killed her children. She thought the children would be taken to hell by Satan – whom she thought lived within her – and that to kill them was to spare them eternal damnation. Similarly, a South Carolina woman convicted of the murder of her two children in 2013 told authorities she believed the family would be reincarnated together in a better world.
Acutely psychotic killers do not give such deeply pondered rationales. For example, in 2011, a Florida woman shot her two children, then told authorities, without remorse, they had been talking back. She had recently been investigated by the state’s Department of Children and Families.
Cases of unwanted children often end with babies thrown into dumpsters or killed immediately after birth. Accidental killings often happen often as a result of an abusive parent and a bad temper – like the case of a Houston father arrested in the fatal beating of a toddler over potty-training accidents.
Spousal revenge was the least common motivator in Resnick’s study. It still appears in recent examples from the Houston area. In June, Christy Sheats (above left) called her two grown daughters, Taylor, 22 (center), and Madison, 17 (right), and estranged husband to a family meeting, during which she killed both daughters in order to hurt her husband. Sheats had suffered from mental health concerns in the past.
Your Emotions after Delivery is a pamphlet that warns mothers to recognize the signs and seek help if they have thoughts or vivid fears of hurting their children. It seems simple. But people tend to avoid mental health treatment out of fear of being stigmatized as crazy. Mothers also fear losing their children if they seek help. In the recent past, mental health treatment has been largely deferred to the prison sector, with conditions addressed only after the patient commits a crime.
“The public now has a better understanding that mental health is a brain disease, not a weakness of character,” Resnick observed. “But the public now perceives the mentally ill as more dangerous than they did 50 years ago.”
Scores of studies reveal mental illness remains largely under-diagnosed. It’s not easy to solve the problem because patients tend to steer clear and doctors stand to lose a lot by improperly prescribing psychiatric medication. “We just have a dire need for service. We need to put mental illness on par with physical illness,” Parnham explained. “The fact that we’re having this conversation means we’ve come a long way since 15 years ago, but we’ve got a long way to go.”
Source: Dylan Baddour, The Houston Chronicle, August 16, 2016.
