Danusha V. Goska

Andrea Yates, Mental Illness, and Murder

This is Danusha Goska.

Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children, cannot be guilty because she is mentally ill. Period. No discussion. End of story.

This position aborts several ethically important questions.

Can a person be both mentally ill and guilty? Hitler, Ted Bundy, bin Laden? Can we believe them sane? Can we believe them innocent?

Must mental illness manifest as murder? This is insulting to the mentally ill and statistically insupportable. According to the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study, mentally ill persons are no more likely to commit violent acts. Even delusions, such as those reported by Yates, "do not predict a higher rate of violent behavior."

Those who insist that Yates is innocent argue that her act is otherwise inexplicable. Sadly, that assumption is incorrect.

Children are often understood as mere extensions of their parents, as accessories. Friends report that Yates was a perfectionist who wanted to be the perfect mom. By her own account, her kids couldn't measure up. And so she killed them. On average, three children die every day in the United States from abuse or neglect. Parental narcissism, a denial of the full humanity of the child, is often the twisted logic behind these deaths.

The refusal to see and condemn child abuse in the Yates case is a tragic denial of the truly innocent, children, sentenced to abuse, and even to death, by parental narcissism.

For Speak Your Mind, this has been Danusha Goska.

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