Depression and Homicide

A Texas woman admittedly drowned her five children a few years ago. She was being treated for depression and psychosis. As someone who has fought dark depression for most of my life, though not psychosis, it’s difficult for me to see how depression alone could cause such an atrocity.

Those who are severely depressed and not psychotic typically do not have the energy to wash their hands let alone drown five children. And then call the police? It doesn’t make sense. Depressed people don’t want to get off the couch. Picking up the phone and talking to anyone is exhausting.

No, this woman is or was psychotic. The amazing thing to me is that her husband seemed to have no clue. Even though he knew his wife had severe trouble with postpartum depression this guy kept having kids. If he was not depressed and/or psychotic, you think he would have slowed down the progeny thing for the sake of his wife and his other children. How anyone can be this clueless or insensitive is remarkable. I can only conclude that he is crazier than his wife, because he exhibited no signs of craziness. The profoundly crazy are sneaky; they never give us any clues until it is too late. Think Ted Bundy. Or Scott Peterson.

Killing your own children in a methodical fashion has to be the definition of insanity. Mothers do not eat their young. They protect them from the promiscuous father who may eat them. I am, frankly, and this will be most disturbing to the majority of you, most concerned about this case because it gives depression a bad rap. People will think that severely depressed people are not just weak-minded and of a defective character, but that they are dangerous as well. Let’s lock them up like we did in the 1st half of the 20th century. In truth, depressed people are too lethargic to pick up a gun and too confused to plot mayhem against anyone but them self. This woman may have been suffering from depression, but there were other demons at work here, and it was those demons that were responsible for this ineffable tragedy, not melancholy. Depressed people steel themselves to block out the nothingness, the hopelessness, the bulky weight of life. They don’t kill others. This poor woman was nuts in addition to being depressed.

I know what you’re thinking. What about the depressed ex-boyfriend who kills his ex-girlfriend and their only child, and then turns the gun on himself? That’s not depression folks, that’s anger and revenge and lunacy too. Depressed people hide under the covers, afraid of the light of tomorrow and the pain that it will bring. No, depressed people are not more prone to violence than other people, and they don’t kill other people more than normal people; they only kill themselves to obliterate the incessant shroud of darkness.