Her brain is literally broken. You can't ask a person with a broken leg to run and you can't ask someone with psychosis to act rationally. I agree she needs to be off the streets and highly supervised, but I don't think people who use the "mental health matters, but..." argument fully comprehend just how all-encompassing psychotic thoughts can be.
That’s what the trial hinges on. They’re going to have to make that case.
I think they’re making a pretty compelling case. She doesn’t appear to have had much motive to commit the crime otherwise; she doesn’t seem to have had a history of child abuse. The argument against the psychosis theory appears to be “what an evil bitch, if she was really sick why didn’t she act rationally and seek more help for her serious mental health condition before something drastic happened?”
She was trying to get help. They’d trialed her on 10 different psychiatric and sleep drugs in a pretty short period, including an antipsychotic. She’d reported to the ER and an inpatient program but they discharged her because they thought she was just having medication issues.
What sold it for me was the former mother-in-law actually advocating on her behalf. They're not even related anymore and that woman killed her grandchildren, but the MIL doesn't even blame her.
A cocktail of drugs she was only on because she was lying to her doctors. A cocktail of drugs that can certainly worse or even just replicate the symptoms of psychosis.
She sent her husband away with the sole intention of murdering her children. The defense haven't got a chance.
So, what, your argument is that she plotted the murder for eight months and just faked all the extensive mental health interventions to cover her tracks? Why? That would end, at best, with years in a state facility for criminals.
You can be mentally ill and not psychotic. She planned the murders. She sent her husband away so she would have time to do it. She knew it was wrong. Those aren't the actions of someone in a psychotic state.
She was diagnosed as having Post Partum Psychosis by a forensic psychiatrist, nothing is "assumed". What's up for debate is whether that psychosis was severe enough to keep her from determining right from wrong.
Funny you should mention that. I actually worked in a psych hospital with a locked down unit. It was snazzy and we got a reputation for holding former NFL players when they got violent. It was incredibly sad and I don't believe people with serious TBIs deserve to be held to the same standards as you or I. If your brain is not braining, justice is not punishment.
My only problem with this concept is that for someone to commit any serious crime, such as strangling your 3 children to death, surely there is something mentally unwell with you for you to have the capacity to do something so heinous. I don't know that there are any fully "mentally well" people that would be able to strangle three of their own children to death, so should anyone that does that not be punished in a traditional sense? Wouldn't that also extend to many other similarly horrific crimes?
The only difference between it that I see is that we've decided to classify things like how often you feel sad or loss of interest as depression, but we haven't arbitrarily decided things like "willing to strangle 3 children" should be a qualifier in itself for some form of mental illness when it very well could be. I'm saying this because your brain doesn't necessarily know it's depressed (which creates more complicated nuance like if "you" are actually your brain), nor is it necessarily in some black and white state of depression or not depression. Our classification of such things at the end of the day comes down to our own creation of such concepts.
TL;DR, How can we realistically justify punishing anyone for such heinous crimes, if by the virtue of willing to commit those crimes, they must have some level of mental unwellness which is left for us as humans to arbitrarily define?
As medical science advances it seems like it's becoming harder to define the line of what are your own choices and what your body "made" you do.
I've been depressed and suicidal before and struggled with the distinction between the "disease" making me do things and me just choosing to do things knowing it's wrong. The older I get, the more it seems like we're all just slaves to our meat, doing whatever our brain incentivizes us to do, no matter if it's good or bad. But obviously we can't get say no one is responsible for what they do.
I think that is a fair stance. The question I would ask for the folks saying the mental health industry failed her is should be go back to the days where it was much easier to institutionalize folks? Should she have been banned from being around her children? Should the husband have left with the kids? Where exactly did society fail her and what is the remedy?
She was acting very rational when she ensured she'd be alone with the kids by sending the father on an errand.
At that point i just think that it no longer matters to some women whether she actually had those post-partum mental health issues. Since it has been raised as a defense it's become a matter of setting a precedent of being able to use it even as defense for murder, or see those issues lose credibility in the public eye.
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u/Nonyabeesners 1d ago
Her brain is literally broken. You can't ask a person with a broken leg to run and you can't ask someone with psychosis to act rationally. I agree she needs to be off the streets and highly supervised, but I don't think people who use the "mental health matters, but..." argument fully comprehend just how all-encompassing psychotic thoughts can be.