Closing the Barn Door After the Horse Has Gotten Out

In recent years, two horrific examples of mothers murdering their children have been widely covered in the media, those being the cases of Susan Smith and Andrea Yates.

For those who don’t remember, Susan Smith killed her two young sons in 1994 by rolling her car into a lake with the boys strapped in car seats. Andrea Yates drowned her five children in 2001.

What links these two women is that both had a history of mental illness and both had connections with Christian fundamentalism.

Susan Smith’s father committed suicide when she was a small child, shortly after divorcing Susan’s mother. Her mother then married Beverly Russell, who, at the time of the crime, was a local Republican party official also active in the Christian Coalition. Susan was raised in a religiously conservative home. But from the time she was fifteen, her stepfather had been sexually abusing her, which no doubt contributed to her mental illness. As a teenager, she attempted to commit suicide twice.

Amazingly enough, a few years ago New Gingrich blamed Democrats for this crime in response to an Associated Press reporter who asked him how that year’s campaign was going:

“I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things." Gingrich said, "The only way you get change is to vote Republican. That's the message for the last three days." Two days later, less than 24 hours before the polls opened, Gingrich defended his comments on the Smith case as no different than what he'd been saying for years -- that violence and related ills arise from a Democratic-controlled political system: "We need very deep change if we're going to turn this country around." Asked if the change he was offering the country would stop killings like those in South Carolina, he replied, "Yes. In my judgment, there's no question."

Boggles the mind.

Andrea Yates and her husband, Rusty, were both extreme religious fundamentalists. At their wedding, they told guests they intended to have as many children as nature allowed them. Five children were born to them in eight years of marriage. Despite his large family, Rusty decided the family would live in a converted bus and that Andrea would home school them. Andrea did not protest, as the Yates both believed that a wife should be totally submissive to her husband, having no more say in the marriage than the children would.

Like Susan Smith, Andrea Yates attempted suicide more than once and was hospitalized for psychotic depression. When she had four children, her psychiatrist strongly recommended that she not have any more, as the stresses of raising so many children would likely bring on more psychotic episodes.

After her release, Rusty Yates moved the family into a house, but the couple disregarded the doctor’s advice not to have more children, no doubt because they felt that birth control was contrary to God’s plan, regardless of circumstances. And so, Andrea had another baby.

Several months later, she drowned all five in the bathtub.

While I believe that both women were properly held responsible for their actions, I can’t help but think that both instances were a matter of closing the barn door after the horse had gotten out. Both women had mental illnesses that were inadequately treated and both had circumstances in their lives that exacerbated their mental problems. No one is perfectly sane their entire lives, then wakes up one morning and suddenly decides to go postal. There are always warning signs of impending breakdown, as was true in the cases of these two women.

I think of these tragedies as failures of the mental health system as much as I see them as personal failures of the women involved.

Thoughts?