@corythatwas
I feel sorry for her but I also feel rather worried about the way that a mother killing a disabled child, is always framed as to be about the sufferings of the mother.
The personhood of the child is eroded and he is only presented in this story as a series of noises and troublesome behaviours that tipped his mother over the edge and as then object of her attention. We don't learn anything about Dylan, there is no sense of loss that he is gone from the world.
It's not just this story, it's also the fact that the journalist chooses to situate the telling in a common narrative that is all about the NT person and not at all about the SN person. Every time you join that line, you are feeding into a perception that SN lives don't matter at all.
Yes, I feel sorry for the mother. But it would have been possible to write the story differently while still showing sympathy for her plight. "This is who Dylan was, sadly his mother killed him during a psychotic episode brought on/exacerbated by stress and lack of support during lockdown".
I do see your point, I think also in the past it has been framed as "the poor child was disabled so they were doing it as a kindness/a mercy killing" etc. Obviously that was very very wrong - disabled childrens lives are of just as much value as any other children. Also when you look at those deaths it is normally very clear that the parents are mentally unwell, (or in a few cases just psychopaths) rather than motivated for concern for the child.
However, the risk of mental health in parents increases with the level of stress they are under. It is an (unfortunate) fact that parenting a child with disabilites can be extremely stressful. A lot of this is down to the level of support given to them - you only have to look at a few threads on mumsnet to see how parents often end up completely isolated from friends, often have to battle with the council for any help whatsoever and have to deal with daily discrimintation when out and about. We need to talk about the impact this can have, and what it can lead to (in very extreme cases) because it needs to change. And it needs to change now.