Severe mental illness overwhelms its victims, astonishing everyone with the drastic personality changes until the right medication can be found to stabilize the brain’s chemical imbalance.
Last month, Andrea Yates crossed the fine line between a severe post-partum depression into a psychosis in which she is reported to have killed her five children. In a zombie-like voice she called and confessed everything to the police. Hurting, puzzled family and friends said, “but she wasn’t like that.”
It is difficult to understand how someone could change so drastically. However, her condition has been known since Hippocrates first described post-partum depression in 460 B.C. One Internet search on the topic yields hundreds of links.
The website for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill says, “As many as 80 percent of women experience the ëpostpartum blues,í a brief period of depressive symptoms. Additionally, 10 percent to 15 percent of women suffer from postpartum clinical depression within three months of delivery. … Once a woman has experienced a postpartum depression, her risk of having another reaches 70 percent. One woman in a thousand experiences a postpartum psychosis – a medical emergency where the woman may inflict harm upon herself and/or her baby.”
The mother of five young children had a condition that bordered on crossing over into a situation with the possibility of suicide and/or infanticide. Her husband’s response? He helped their seven-year-old son post a list of “ways to deal with stress” on the refrigerator. What are the odds that the list included, “Hire a mother’s helper”?
Yates’ siblings reportedly take medication for depression. Her father had recently died after a lengthy illness. She was again severely depressed after a pregnancy, but this time her body was not responding to medication.
Like a cancer victim in the middle of chemotherapy, Yates could not shrug her shoulders, take a deep breath and say, ‘I’m fine”. Yet, nothing has been reported about anyone helping with her workload during her illness – unless you actually count that list.
The deaths of these children underscores the lack of understanding and response to a severe mental illness ñ and the potential danger of not understanding.
Laws need to be changed about medical intervention for the mentally ill.