Scott Bucholz via AP- Father of baby killed
I personally never suffered with postpartum depression, so I can’t say 1st hand about the severity of the condition. I have however, had several friends whom suffered with the illness. These new mothers were down and out, suffered with mood swings, sudden crying and sadness for no apparent reason.
Before I go any further let me clarify, I do know this condition exists! I just do not believe it should be used to get off murder.
While I am no professional, I can’t help but wonder if postpartum depression is being used as a cop-out for mothers who commit the ultimate crime- killing their own child. Defense attorneys look for any reason to help their client, we already know that. I however, do not agree that it should be allowed as a reason to kill and get away with it. Murder is murder- regardless..right?
Today I came across an older news note about Otty Sanchez, a mother who killed and ate her child. This woman who investigators say suffered with postpartum depression, killed her baby, tore his face off, chewed his toes off and ate pieces of his brain. Otty Sanchez was found not guilty by reason of insanity in the death of her baby.
Regardless of the reason, she killed her child! She should spend the rest of her life in prison or be handed the death penalty!
I’m sure you all remember Andrea Yates, the mother who killed her 5 children by drowning them in the bathtub. Her attorneys said she had been suffering from severe postpartum psychosis, and a jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity in 2006.
After looking at just these two cases, out of thousands, I can’t help but wonder if people are using postpartum depression as a cop-out when they kill their children. It seems like the cases where postpartum depression is claimed it allows the mothers to serve no jail time, face no prison time, and pretty much get off free. Maybe they are labeled insane, but who the hell would no be insane after they killed their own blood?
What are your thoughts? Should moms be able to use postpartum depression as an excuse for killing their children or should they rot in prison with the rest of the criminals?
About Tara V
So, you believe it’s an actual condition, you just don’t believe that one’s mental health should be taken into account during trial? Do you feel the same way about all mental health defenses of all crimes or just PPD?
Hi Ester, I do believe it is an actual condition as I said above. A crime is a crime, regardless of the mental health. I personally feel like it is used to much to get people off horrific crimes. When a mother kills her child, I find no excuse in the world valid enough for her to walk free.
Andrea Yates didn’t “walk free,” she was committed to a mental institution.
Wendy, you don’t think that’s walking free when she should have received the death penalty?
Treatment first then do the punishment. Remember there still was a crime committed that can’t be taken back.
For anyone who cares to read my in-depth response to this blog entry, as one who has PERSONALLY and 1st hand dealt with PostPartum Depression, here you go: http://journeythroughppd.blogspot.com/2012/01/is-post-partum-depression-cop-out.html
No, I did not kill anyone although I did feel like killing myself.
Read and responded. VERY well said, Esther. Blessings to you.
I don’t think anyone should receive the death penalty.
And being committed to a state prison is being committed to a state prison. I’m sorry you don’t like the type of prison she was sent to but the fact remains, she didn’t get off scott free.
Quite frankly, my blog is not an attempt to change your mind b/c you seem pretty darn well set in your ways. I hope, however, to reach those who may be basing their opinions off your (factually inaccurate and misleading) blog.
You don’t think anyone should receive the death penalty? What if your mother or kid was killed? Would you feel the same way?
I am really blown away at how you think this behavior is ok and that these people should not be punished. If I killed my own child, I’d expect the same fate- prison.
*deep, calming breath*
First of all, let me say that I am glad you’ve never suffered from a severe postpartum mood disorder. It’s not an experience I’d wish on anyone.
Secondly, I will state that my opinion about this blog post is that it is, at best, an opportunity to educate you and those who think about PPMDs in the same terms as you. At worst, it’s perpetuating harmful stigmas against those suffering from severe PPMDs and mental health issues.
It’s important to note that postpartum depression, anxiety and/or obsessive/compulsive disorder are very real (and usually very treatable) conditions. It’s also important to note that postpartum psychosis is on a much more critical level that requires immediate intervention and treatment.
At http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/A+psychotic+break psychosis is defined as “a symptom or feature of mental illness typically characterized by radical changes in personality, impaired functioning, and a distorted or nonexistent sense of objective reality.” That last part is especially pertinent to the discussion – people suffering with psychosis have a distorted or nonexistent sense of objective reality. They can’t objectively look at their thought processes and ask themselves “is this thought or action healthy or unhealthy?” or “If I do X, the logical consequences will be Z”. To put it simply, the person suffering with a psychotic episode is not in her or his “right mind”.
I personally went through severe postpartum depression and anxiety and suffered from obsessive thoughts, especially with my firstborn 17 years ago. One day when my daughter was inconsolable – I’d fed, burped, diapered, rocked, sung to, played with, and everything else I could think to try – I felt the tension inside me rise to a level that was physically and mentally painful. I put her safely into her crib, left the room, and shut the door. As I slid down the wall to the floor, I closed my eyes and had a horrifying vision – almost like watching a movie – in my head. In this vision, I could clearly see myself grabbing her by her tiny feet and slamming her head into her white bedroom wall until blood ran down the pristine surface. I was TERRIFIED! I had the wherewithal to immediately go to the phone and call my OBGYN. The nurse put me on with her in moments, and I tearfully admitted that I’d had this horrible thought. She told me that the fact I could recognize the thought as being horrible was a good sign that I was not, in fact, completely losing my rational mind in that moment. She had me call my mom to come over and we put the baby in the car seat, strapped ourselves in, and headed to the OBGYN’s office. She sat me down and told me about postpartum mood disorders. I got immediate information, validation, intervention and treatment.
Some women aren’t as lucky as me. Some women can’t afford even the basic treatments during pregnancy. Some women live in areas where the “professionals” don’t believe in PPMDs, or live with a partner who refuses to let her seek help because of the stigma surrounding mental illness. Some women suffer from not “just” depression or anxiety, but experience psychosis.
To answer your question “Is Postpartum Depression a Cop Out?”, my answer is a resounding NO. Do you honestly think a woman in a healthy state of mind, or in their “right mind”, could eat their own baby? Or drown her children one by one?
This is not to imply that a criminal offense should go unpunished. But I think that people suffering from an untreated, or poorly treated, mental illness should not simply be locked away in a jail cell. I believe they should be put into a secure mental health facility and get treatment while serving their time.
It saddens me to think that your blog post here might serve as a deterrent to even one mother who feels she might be suffering from a PPMD. There are many, many moms who need to be educated about this subject, and who need to understand that postpartum psychosis is pretty rare. It’s important for moms to understand that even if they DO wind up suffering with psychosis in the postpartum period, that does not mean they are going to harm their baby. I hope that those who have reposted this link on Twitter aren’t inadvertently strengthening the stigma that exists around mental illness. You’ve got an opportunity here to educate yourself and your readers, and to be a beacon of light and hope for new mothers who may suffer from PPMDs. My hope is that you will use your blog to be helpful and uplifting and educating rather than perpetuating myths and stigmas.
I wish I could +1 this a million times. Very very VERY well put.
No I don’t think a woman in her right mind would kill her baby or eat it, but that brings up this point.
There is no “cure” for schizophrenia and no “cure” for mental disturbances that bring on psychotic breaks. You seem to find that spending time in a mental health facility will cure this illness. Show me a case of a woman who spent time in one, was released and is now living a normal life.
The problem with looking at treatment followed by release for these individuals is that the diagnosis occurs in a controlled environment where the individuals are monitored. A person in a mental unit isn’t subjected to the same stimuli that they will encounter upon release. Also, unless we burden society with monitoring these poeple every day we cannot ensure they take any meds required to keep their brain chemistry in balance to keep them from becoming, once more, a danger.
Which creates more strain on the economy paying to keep these people in facilities. If they are heavily medicated there is no quality of life anyway.
You are completely incorrect. There is an entire category of anti-psychotic drugs that do a marvelous job of treating psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia.
You said “Show me a case of a woman who spent time in one, was released and is now living a normal life.”
To what end? It seems rather apparent that you are very strongly attached to your current mindset, and would willfully opt to ignore or discount any of the factual information you’ve already been given.
I think it’s sad and shameful that you would choose to use your public voice to shame, ridicule, and demonize women with a very real, very serious, and treatable condition that they neither asked to have nor rejoice in claiming.
I would ask you to think about something (NOT that I’d wish this on anyone, ever) – do you have a daughter or other young, beloved female relative? If, Heaven forbid, she experienced postpartum psychosis an attempted to harm their own child, would you demand she be put to death? Would you tell the judge and jury to throw the book at her because she’s just using postpartum psychosis as a cop-out?
I don’t expect you to do a complete turnaround. Your thoughts on this subject are your own, and you have every right to them. However, I do hope that you will attempt to put aside your contempt for these “horrible moms” and attempt to understand that the world is simply not as black and white as you might like to believe.
Unlike Tara, James is not saying that PPD is a cop-out. He’s saying that there’s no hope for PPD at all, so what’s the point? I do disagree with that though–there IS treatment available, and I don’t think living on medication eliminates the quality of life. The point of medication is to BRING BACK the quality of life.
These woman sicken me. How could any woman murder her own child? These people should sit in a prison cell along with the other murders out there. I agree with Tara that there is no excuse for killing even if depression is an issue.
Firstly, let me just say that everyone is allowed to wonder things, especially when you don’t have any personal experience with an illness such as postpartum depression–or in the cases you cite (Andrea Yates, Otty Sanchez), postpartum psychosis–AND you’re not a medical/mental health professional. But let’s just get something straight here. There is a HUGE difference between postpartum depression (PPD) and postpartum psychosis. I blogged about this very thing back in Sept ’10 when certain comments–comments made out of ignorance– rubbed me the wrong way. It’s not through your fault or the public’s fault that there is not a whole lot of knowledge about perinatal mood disorders out there. But it’s the lack of awareness that is causing the general population to have misconceptions, which can be very dangerous. Dangerous in that mothers who suffer from a perinatal mood disorder suffer the consequence (e.g., fear of getting help, fear of being labeled another Andrea Yates when in fact Andrea had postpartum psychosis, far rarer than PPD). And that really pisses me off. These misconceptions cause a vicious cycle of ignorance and incorrect generalizations and assumptions–such as moms deliberately setting out to use PPD (not even the right term illness) to escape punishment for killing their babies. Before you go running around proclaiming that the mother who is devastated by a horrible illness such as postpartum psychosis and in rare instances may kill her baby deserves to be put to death herself, become knowledgeable about postpartum psychosis. So, please read the article by Katherine Stone (that link was provided via a tweet today), and please read this: http://ivysppdblog.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/postpartum-psychosis-know-the-facts-and-stop-judging-based-on-ignorance/
There is a whole lot more to it than you think.
Ivy,
my post here is not questioning PPD or postpartum psychosis. It’s my option that regardless of the issue at hand, if you murder your kids you should pay the same price anyone else would pay. There is no justification for the issue. The only feedback here is coming from other suffers of PPD, which leads me to believe your trying to rationalize here. A person with mental disease is still legally responsible for their actions- hands down.
Not going to debate this with you. You can think whatever you want. Until you’ve suffered from a postpartum mood disorder yourself, you can’t possibly understand or empathize. Period.
OK, let me try a different approach then. Disclaimer: I had a psychotic episode after the birth of my daughter and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis. Although that fact might cause some bias surrounding this extremely inflammatory blog post, I’m trying to present facts to help inform you and your readers about this important mental health issue.
Tara wrote, “A person with mental disease is still legally responsible for their actions – hands down.” – Not according to our current judicial system and it’s been that way for a very long time. A friend of mine expressed it amazingly well, “I would want to point out that in our country we don’t punish people who cannot form intent, and a person suffering with ppd/ppp may be unable to form intent. It isn’t about a cop out, it is about a mental condition which may impair a person’s ability to form the intent required to establish a crime. She’s saying murder is murder, but murder is a legal term defined by intent. Aside from being ignorant about ppd, she is ignorant about the basics of our justice system.”
At the very least it might be worth taking a look at the insanity defense on Wikipedia and the history of it. And although 10 years old, statistics show it is not as prevalent as one might assume – “According to an eight-state study, the insanity defense is used in less than 1% of all court cases and, when used, has only a 26% success rate.[2] Of those cases that were successful, 90% of the defendants had been previously diagnosed with mental illness.”
“In Ford v. Wainwright 477 U.S. 399 (1986), the US Supreme Court upheld the common law rule that the insane cannot be executed. It further stated that a person under the death penalty is entitled to a competency evaluation and to an evidentiary hearing in court on the question of his competency to be executed.” I am on the fence about the death penalty as a whole, but when it comes to this ruling, I am in complete agreement. I do not believe that someone that has been found to be insane should be executed. To me that is inhumane.
We as a society should be arguing for better mental health care in this country, preventative care and education, and more funding for studies into how our minds work. We should not be bickering about whether or not people that are sick, genuinely sick, deserve to be killed as some twisted form of justice.
You say that you “do know this condition exists”. Through your words, I would say you know nothing about this condition. I would even question what type of friend you are if you have several friends that experienced PPD and yet you still perpetuate such misinformation about the illness. You mix stories of postpartum depression with examples of postpartum psychosis, two very unique and different illnesses. You show absolutely no empathy for the millions of women (fellow mothers) and the families that have been affected by these illnesses.
I know the pure joy of a mother’s love. I know in my heart I would do anything and everything in my power to protect my children from harm. And yet, I’ve experienced something no mother should experience: intruding thoughts, so dark and viscous they make me cry just to think about them. Simply because of an illness I was unaware of and chemicals acting in my brain, completely out of my control, I became my own enemy, my own worst nightmare. I was extremely lucky though. Through the kindness of perfect strangers who called 911 for me, I got the help and care I needed for a full recovery.
I’m thankful that in this country, we have empathy and we have had well educated individuals who have put rules in place to protect the mentally ill in cases like this. I challenge you to educate yourself on these illnesses before you broadcast your ignorance to the world next time. That’s a disease I am trying to stop the spread of, one person at a time.
Hello Heather,
This blog post made no medial claims at all.
Andrea Yates suffered with severe postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis. You say the people who suffer with postpartum psychosis have no control of themselves, yet Andrea admitted to wanting to drown her kids in May and planned the murder. She did not kill her children until June. Now, is she was so “out of it”, how could she remember wanting to kill them in May?
At one point, she “made up her mind” to kill the children, but held back and went back to sleep because Rusty was there. This right here shows she was able to think clearly, if she was able to know that her husband would stop her from killing the kids.
In 2001 is when she started working on her plan to kill her kids and knew if she told her psychiatrist she would be hospitalized.
She was mentally ill. Anyone who can kill their own child is obviously mentally ill, which I never questioned. My question was this… Are people using the illness as a cop-out? Meaning is this illness being used to spare all mothers who kill their child.
Andrea had a plan and she acted on it. It was not an all of a sudden urge to kill her kids that over took her. She planned it and acted on it.
Thats what boils my blood. She CHOSE to do this. She made a concience decision to kill her kids. If she had told her psychiatrist and had been hospitalised she would have been doing the right thing in order to protect her children from herself. Instead she CHOSE not to. She CHOSE to kill her children. I know a girl who’s mother tried to drown her when she was 4 years old. Thankfully she was rescued but sadly went from foster home to foster home and had a very difficult life as a result. And the mother? Sitting pretty recieving benifits and not having to work for a living because she’s “ill.” Nowadays we care more about grown adults than we do do innocent children who will not stand a chance in life, and thats IF they survive being killed by their own parent.
“We as a society should be arguing for better mental health care in this country, preventative care and education, and more funding for studies into how our minds work. We should not be bickering about whether or not people that are sick, genuinely sick, deserve to be killed as some twisted form of justice.”
Amen, and amen!
I am also going to add a different approach, and I’m sure some people will get offended. I think it’s human nature to have thoughts about killing someone. It does NOT mean that we actually want to kill that person…it’s just a thought that comes into our head because it’s in our nature. Animals kill their young all the time! We are intelligent animals, but we still have some of the most basic instincts. We’re not that much “better” than animals. There’s a big difference between actually WANTING to kill your child and getting unwanted thoughts about killing it. The thing that matters here is whether the mother loves her kid. If she truly loves her kid and gets these dark thoughts about killing it, it doesn’t mean she wants to kill it! Sometimes we just have those thoughts that we can’t explain. The point is that she won’t go through with it, just like you didn’t go through with it and chose to get treatment for it. Some women just don’t love their kids, plain and simple. You actually do love your kids, so you made the right decision to seek help as soon as you had that dark thought. That’s the difference. There are women out there who don’t give a damn about their children, and that doesn’t mean that they have a mental illness.
I agree with you 100%. The sad thing is alot of women who have suffeered with PPD would also agree with you as they rightly say they managed not to horribly murder their own babies and are angry about people who use the same hell they went through as an excuse. There’s just not nough people speaking out on this as its politically incorrect and we’re supposed to be like all the do-gooders who want to release murderers back into society as they never commit their crimes again… oh no wait hang on, they do! Thank goodness for you Tara,
Yes it is being used as a copout, actually way to often. Every time I see a news report on a mother who killed her baby they claim postpartum. It’s bullshit and no reason what so ever to kill your baby. These people are sick in the fu*king head and need to be treated just like every other murdered.
To Esther, there is a big difference in being in a nut house and prison. You put one of these sick baby killers in prison and see how long they last. Put them in with other nut jobs and they all get along.
“Nut house”? Really?
You know what, I really and truly feel sorry for y’all. Very very VERY sorry. The higher the horse, the harder the fall.
I just can’t even come up with words to properly express a rational and logical response to your comment so I’m going to give up trying.
Im glad to see someone getting passionate for these kids who are being killed by their own moms. They deserved better in this life. They’re dead and nothing will change that. Their murderer is still alive and are recieving therapy because they’re considered to be ill. Would we consider the murderer to be ill and deserving of compassion and therapy and second chances if it had been a man who’d kidnapped the child and killed them in the same manner? Absolutely not, and frankly the only difference I see between the two senarios is that its the ultimate crime when its a mother who kills her own baby. That baby in the article above deserved compassion and care from the one person in the world he should have got it from. Instead he’s dead.
I don’t normally post comments but thought I would chime in here. I suffered with postpartum psychosis after the birth of my 3rd child. I was hospitalized for 2 weeks and it took a lot of therapy and medication to overcome this. I never wanted to kill my child but did want to kill myself. In fact I tried to OD on medication.
I do sympathize with women who suffer from this horrible condition and would not wish it upon my worst enemy but I too agree that we all should be treated equal in the justice system.
Its not fair to for the system to claim someone has ppd or postpartum psychosis as an easy out for life in prison or the death penalty. The system allows people to claim these conditions way to often in an effort to save their client. To be real honest, it should not matter what your mental health is. If you kill someone they are dead and do not come back. You may recover from ppd or postpartum psychosis but the fact remains the child is dead.
Aren’t ALL murderers crazy?
Do you want them still living among you?
The prosecution rests.
Exactly. Theres no way you’d ever say, “oh that poor man who horribly tortured, raped and murdered that young girl. Lets send him off for some therapy as he must be suffering terribly.” But aparently its the upstanding and correct attitude to have towards women who butcher their own babies. No way.
Thank God someone came out and said it. Too often PPD is used as an excuse for murder and its an instult to the majority women who go through it and manage not to butcher their children to death. For all the people who are saying “but its Post Natal Psychosis and its actually very severe and the sufferer is not responsible…” etc. why dont we just let off all murderers as they suffer from phsycosis too – hence the term phsychopath, or phsycho. Murder is murder and there is no worse crime than that of killing an innocent little kid. I feel sorry for the dads of these murdered children as they’ll be depressed for the rest of their lives but the system wont care because number 1 they’re men and we forget that men actually have feelings and number 2 they havent commited any crimes and the do-gooders will have no reason to mollycoddle them. So sick of political correct nonesense which allows criminals to get away with murder literally. Its like feeling sorry for a peadophile because he claims to have had a bad childhood.