Mad as Hell

I was reading the testimony of Andrea Yates' psychiatrist in the New York Times:

``She was convinced the children were going to be tormented (by Satan) the rest of their lives and they were going to perish in the fires of hell,'' she said. ``She suffered a serious mental illness.''

I'm wondering about the role of fanatical religious beliefs in how psychosis is acted out. I'm not saying that Yates' beliefs cause her alleged psychosis or that all fundies are psychotic. But if she didn't have these beliefs about Satan and hell, would she have killed her children? If she truly believed her kids were going to hell, these horrifying acts would be quite rational within the realm of her insanity. Some on this forum have even argued in the past that this would be a rational act for a sane fundamentalist.

Anunnaki

I wonder why nobody has claimed that Yates is proof of the validity of Christianity.
Make sense out of this for me......
1.) Christians are taught that Satan is real and he`s something you need to watch out for.
2.) The Pope himself has been conducting excorcisms.
3.) Wackos in the South are constantly laying hands on people to drive Satan out of them.
4.) Christians believe in magic,supernatural interventions,demons,witches,angels etc... They are told by their religious leaders that all these things can and DO communicate with and sometimes guide and control peoples actions.

So it`s sane to believe Satan is real and he can control people,but anyone who claims first hand experience is immediately labeled as crazy?

brighid

It seems that Andrea Yates has suffered from mental illness all her life and that it is prevalent in her family. The information that has been presented about her and his history shows how poor our mental health care is in this country, but this is certainly no excuse for murdering your children. I definitely think that her Fundamentalist beliefs, those of her husband and the clergy she corresponded with fed her feelings of worthlessness, desperation and homicidal mania. I think they bare a portion of the responsibility in this horrible crime. I don’t think we can completely blame her religious nature because she was mentally ill long before she met her husband and changed to this particular brand of Christian Fundamentalism. I think her husband was incredibly irresponsible with how he handled her treatment as his wife, the mother of his children and her health care – both physical and mental. The doctors told her that she shouldn’t get pregnant again because of her previous bouts with postpartum depression and because of their religious convictions they simply cast that advice to the wind and put their fate in God’s hands.

It’s seems God’s hands were that of a demon and not of a loving Savior if this is the fate He bestowed upon these children. But that is a bunch of crap anyway. A woman without a history of mental illness would have felt overwhelmed with caring for four children and being pregnant so many times in close succession. It certainly didn’t help that her husband appears to be a totally insensitive bastard who also spews the Fundamental crap as well. Andrea Yates believed what the Bible said about her only ability to be redeemed as a woman was through childbirth. She believed she was possessed by the devil and His demons but schizophrenia was the real monster – a manageable monster that soon got out of control by another pregnancy, birth, poor care from mental health professionals and poor treatment by her husband. Ultimately, no one else is fully culpable for this crime except Andrea Yates. Her husband plays a part, her religion plays a larger part and her doctor was negligent. In the end, it was her defenseless and innocent children that paid the price. Andrea Yates may have been able to manage her disease if she didn’t have so many children, if she wasn’t told time and time again by her husband, her pastor and the Bible that she was evil by design. All of these factors created the monster that is now Andrea Yates.

I don’t believe she deserves any sort of clemency. But I think she should not be released from the hell that she is in by being put to death. This woman and her husband should have to live with the guilt of this for the rest of their natural lives. And I think while she serves her life sentence that she should be given proper treatment for her illness and that she should work towards bettering the system and attempt to redeem herself. I cannot imagine killing a child, and certainly not my own child. It makes me sick thinking about someone harming my child and I definitely have the fierce female of the species type instincts and I know I could harm or kill someone threatening my child. Nothing can ever truly redeem Andrea Yates and the crimes she has committed. Nothing will bring her innocent, loving children back but we can all learn something very valuable from this horror story. And hopefully, something will come out of this that will help prevent this type of thing happening in the future.

There is one thing that bothers me about this and how it is being handled in the media – specifically the cries for empathy for this white, Christian woman. We all know if this was an equally depressed, mentally ill minority man or woman who came in to her home, chased her children down and murdered each one that the treatment of that criminal would be much different, and the portrayal of that person would be different as well. This person would be portrayed as an unthinkable monster, there would be state and nationwide calls for a swift execution and there would be no celebrities (Rosie O’Donnell) coming to his/her defense about how horrible it is to be mentally ill, depressed and homicidal. We should all feel badly that she did not receive the treatment she needed, but she has always known right from wrong, or else she wouldn’t have been able to suppress her horrible feelings for so many years. She killed her children and there is nothing worse then a parent killing their child. She should be held accountable, without any plea bargaining shit about her mental incompetence. You have to be fucked out of your mind to do that to another human being and even more so to do it to your own children. That doesn’t mean you are not responsible for your actions.

Brighid

HelenM

I think that a mentally ill person will fantasize according to his or her beliefs.

Although the particular things Andrea Yates said and believed do come from Christian theology, the idea that her kids are better off dead because she's such a terrible mother, could have been taken from any framework of belief, I'd say.

So I don't think that she'd necessarily have been prevented from killing them if she had different religious beliefs, or no religious beliefs.

That's my personal opinion. I don't know though, of course.

love
Helen

Echo

Not being a psychiatrist or member of the jury or privy to much information about Yates, I'm not really in a position to judge, but thus far I am not quite convinced she really believes all that about Satan and her children burning in Hell. She probably realizes that by calmly calling the police and her husband after the crime, she has made it a lot more difficult to convince people that she was psychotic...sick, yes, but psychotic? So I think she is now being as outrageous as possible and going overboard on the "satan told me to do it" stuff in order to increase her chances of being found not guilty by reason of insanity.

But I agree that she is very ill, and I think she would have done this regardless of religious belief.

Matt

This happend near where I live and the woman was going to try the post-partum depression defense. I think that her lawyers changed her defense to a thyroid disorder when they realized that no one in the area was buying the post-partum excuse. The jury would have none of it.


<a href="http://www.starnews.com/library/factfiles/accidents/2000/Ind67/wrongway.html" target="_blank">An Earlier Attempt At The Post-Partum Depression Defense</a>

Anunnaki

There was a woman on the news the other night who has written a book about the Yates case called "Breaking Point".

I didn`t catch the whole news segment,but what I did hear was that Andrea was was a stable person with a career before she marrired her husband and became his fundy Christian baby factory. She wasn`t even all that religious before any of this.
It was his decision to have as many kids as God wanted and it was his decision to homecshool the kids. All of the work involved with this,of course,was thrown on Andreas back.
It looks as if birthing,talking care of and teaching all these kids 24/7 combined with having to deal with Moses when he got home from work everyday drove her over the brink. I personally can not imagine being in her shoes.

It was also mentioned that her loving Christian husband believed that all women are witches.

I`m not sure about this,but I wouldn`t be surprised to find out that the kids ultra biblical names were all his desicions.

Ah,nothing like that sweet Old Testament love.

[ February 26, 2002: Message edited by: Anunnaki ]</p>

Toto

<a href="http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/news/12102_yatesexcerpts2.html" target="_blank">Some excerpts from the Breaking Point</a>

The Yates followed an off-beat preacher named Woroniecki:

brighid

Her husband didn’t make her do anything. As much as I enjoy bashing egomaniacal, abusive jerks like her husband she willingly accepted her duty as a good, Christian wife. We don’t live in Afghanistan where a woman can’t leave her husband and she could have left his sorry ass at anytime. There is such a thing a birth control and she could easily have gotten birth control in the form of a pill or IUD without her husband knowing shit from shineola.

I am personally sick of women who give up their personal power and control over their lives and futures to men. She was certainly WAY over burdened, and should not have gone against her doctors advice about having more children and if she really hated her husband then she should have killed him – not her children. Not that she would be completely justified in killing him – but LEAVE for crying out loud.

Mentally ill women should not be having child, after child, after child - against the advice of her doctors. Parenting is tough work for those of us lucky enough not to suffer from any form of mental illness, temporary or requiring life long medication!


Brighid

Jimmy Higgins

The question is whether she knew what she was doing was wrong. Nothing else matters and I think some people don't realize this.

She "justified" her actions by claiming that life would have been hell (and their children being brought up home-schooled I probably wouldn't doubt that). Just because this justification seems crazy doesn't mean anything. If she killed her children because god told her to, that would be an insanity defense, but the fact that she has to justify what she did is a clear sign she knew what she was doing was wrong. The difference and confusion here is that she thinks the positives outweight the negatives. However, because she recognizes the negatives and ills of her actions then and now, she was not "insane" and should get the death penalty (something I'm really against, though there is no doubt of who did the crime here).

One thing about Yates I found interesting was how the mother and children smiled alike. That wasn't a normal smile. There was some serious problems (mentally) in that household. The father should go to jail just for being such a jackass.