To be disgusted by murder-suicide reporting?

I have a family member who may end up doing this.
There is nothing to help him.
Carers are a naive fantasy.
She has assaulted him many many times, with knives and biting, with boiling water. She will attack him if he falls to sleep. She herself doesn't sleep at all at least one in two nights. She has more contact with the police than with social care.
He is 89, with Parkinson's. No one cares. She wishes she were dead. She occasionally says so, but mainly hisses screams and spits and whacks.
I cannot overemphasize how useless medical and care services have been. One or other of them will be murdered soon enough. I think she will kill him before he breaks, but I could be wrong.

You are comparing apples with oranges. The wife committed no crime against him.

We don’t know that she didn’t.

OK maybe there was nothing written down, but honestly, how many of us have had this type of conversation with our long term partners? I know I have as has DH - also with DC that we don’t want resuscitated/kept alive.

How do you know? Were you there?

Oh, he should have just asked someone for help…
Of course why didn’t he think of that. Let me get the yellow pages…

If I’m ever in that situation I’ll be telling DH to whack me with a hammer as well

And that is your choice, but that doesn't seem to be what happened here.

By taking the wife’s health condition out of the equation you are asking a totally different question so not relevant.
Same as me going into the street and whacking a guy over the head with a baseball bat. Not good. Same guy breaks into my house in the middle of the night you can bet I’ll beat the shit out of him with said bat.

Many diseases are horrific. It is not ok to snap and bludgeon people whether one is fatigued or not.

It is not hard to get carers, we've no idea why he didn't ask for help but to beat someone to death is abhorrent. No empathy from me whatsoever.

My view is that the wife's health condition should be taken out of the equation.

What would we all be saying if she hadn't had Huntington's and been bludgeoned to death by her husband?

If she had asked him to help end her life, of course that would be very different.

This.
I’m not sure why people think overdosing/poisoning or suffocating someone are somehow “gentler” or more compassionate. Slow multi organ failure or fighting for a breath are not more “humane”.

being knocked unconscious and then dying by strangulation is probably a less stressful way of dying than others suggested.,

You keep saying there is no indication she wanted to end her life. Equally there was indication she wanted to continue living either. You simply don’t know either way. You have the bare minimum of details.
All we know is their lives were hell and they are both better off where they are now.
And as for “they could have gone to Dignitas” give me a break. If I’m ever in that situation I’ll be telling DH to whack me with a hammer as well.

She had Huntington's. It is a horrific disease. She will have had significant behavioural challenges. People usually end up in very specialised placements. When it progresses, you will lose your ability to eat, walk, and communicate.

Given how difficult it is to get things like funding and social care support, I suspect this man simply snapped after years of burnout and carer's fatigue. I actually do have a lot of empathy in this situation.

I don't know, to me it's similar to the Olga Freeman or Tania Clarence cases. It can be very awful and wrong yet understandable at the same time. Anyone who has been a full time carer will know how it can be utterly despairing. Huntingdon's is particularly dreadful.

'Yes, carbon monoxide would be far less brutal than strangling and beating her to death'

Yes. He lost it didn't he, maybe regretted it and killed himself too. Mercy killing is an appalling way to describe someone who was bludgeoned and strangled.

I agree with this. Being a carer to someone with a degenerative condition is absolutely horrendous. Of course the vast majority of people wouldn’t be driven to murder but I can certainly see, without condoning it, how someone could be driven to despair. Clearly I don’t know if this is the case here, but neither does anyone know for certain that this wasn’t what happened. Taking care of someone isn’t always about bed baths, cosy chats and cups of tea. It can suck the very life out of you. Once again, I’m certainly not saying I agree with what he did, but I can see why it might happen in certain circumstances. The coroner did not describe it as a mercy killing. That was the Daily Mail being the Daily Mail.

I had this feeling with the elderly couple who jumped off the cliff, it was all reported as being a lovely, heartbreaking story that they couldn’t live without each other. How do we know that she wasn’t coerced!

I think he must have been a desperate man. I thought she may have had dementia when I read the headline but this disease sounds similar. Sad story all round.

he chose to kill her first so that she didn’t continue to live in a terrible state

It was not up to him to decide that.

If it was a mercy killing, he could have helped her take an overdose.

@Maddyisqueen is right that carers are all too often left to fend for themselves, but there are millions of carers who don't end up violently murdering the person they care for.

So very sad whatever the reasons were.

Do you know what ‘inverted commas’ mean ? They are used the article you refer to.

It can be very easy to judge other people’s lives when you are not living their life. Unless you have experienced the same situation, you are in no position to condemn. Maybe you should maybe just be grateful, and hope that you are never in a situation where you feel so desperate that murder /suicide seems like a good solution.

I have to say I wanted to say I have friends family in this situation and it’s heartbreaking - the help that’s needed for the partner caring does not exist - carers are so left to fend for themselves albeit they don’t want spend their kids inheritance on care as they don’t see the value the same
as we might

I was scared to post it!