To want to tell people this?

[SecretNickname]

With regard to mothers who kill themselves and their children:

Depression is a vile, vile illness. Many, many people commit suicide when in the grip of it, when you are so low that all you can do is lie on the floor weeping and you can't ever see a time when you won't be doing that. I think it's such a tragedy that it makes people take their own lives, when careful support and counselling could help them learn to manage it...or it could not. Not everyone can learn to manage their depression, or even realise they have it. Some people have people around them who don't take it seriously as an illness and say things like 'look at your lovely children! You have nothing to be depressed about!' and 'pull yourself together'.

The only thing that has stopped me killing myself at times, when in the grip of a depresseive episode, has been the unbearable thought of leaving my children motherless and what that would do to them. I have been very aware on many an occasion that it is only one step to realising that if I can't continue in this life, and leaving my children motherless due to suicide would be highly likely to create a life for them full of depression and hideousness, then the most logical option would be to kill us all. I never, ever let myself get that far. Whenever I've felt suicidal, I've called the samaritans or my mum or a friend and sobbed and sobbed and talked and talked until the suicidal feelings have gone. And then I've talked and talked to people to try and continue getting better at managing it.

TBH, I think the method for this particular woman does suggest something more than desperate depression - you'd have to be pretty angry to stab your children, as well as just despairing. But I think it's all to easy to be vile to these mothers who may be doing the absolute best thing they can think of for their children at that time.

It is desperately tragic and sad that these women think that killing everyone would be the best option - better than killing herself and leaving her children dealing with the aftermath. I am lucky and grateful that I have the support and love to have never got to that point, and the intelligence and knowledge to know where to get emergency help when I've needed it. And the awareness to understand my illness and how to recognise when it is creating a situation that is out of my control and to know how to bring it back into my control.

You misunderstand what I said. My point was that being the child in the scenario makes it less likely that you can understand the motivation from the parents viewpoint. And to understand that another mother might have a different motivation from your mothers.

Me talking with my Samaritan head on - no-one can know the mind of a suidical person, nor can they relate to them, nor can they understand, nor have they been through it themselves ...for we all have our own individual experiences, no two of which are the same.

We can empathise, not least when we learn that they have been dealing with a difficult situation but no more.

Places like this (interet forums etc) are good because they allow people to vent their feelings, to minimise their bottling them up.

Of course, the difference is that here on MN we do judge and give our (badly-informed) opinions and we focus on the problem whereas at Samaritans we would focus on the feelings alone - to explore them and also examine whether there have been any feelings of suicide, plans etc. All without an ounce of judgement or criticism.

Me with my own, untrained, raw response? She was wholly selfish and feared having to share custody with her estranged husband. That being to difficult for her, she decided to spite him and herself bu killing the very children who apparently meant so much to her.

See, I'd have said, "No mother would ever kill her child, even when depressed". Till PND hit me so damn hard. I Thought i was ok... then I realise I thought it would be a good idea to kill my beautiful baby (who bizarrely I was very well bonded with), I went through the thought of how to do it. I even picked up a pillow. All while crying. And I remember thinking that no one would tell me off or take my other child because, clearly, the baby wanted to be dead because she was so unhappy being alive. THOSE were my thoughts. Utterly STUPID and IRRATIONAL ones. I had all I can call, a FLASH of realisation and TOTALLY freaked out. I told DH to take the children away from me because I was a danger to them etc. I even told my HV. And you know what? They said, oh, well you would never have done it. WHAT?? The thoughts were SO persuasive. I shake even now to think of it. I didn't do anything because something inside stopped me, but what if people don't have that switch. Afterwards is too late to come to your sense.
Something at that point was going WRONG with my thought processes, though not sure if my ability to think on two levels discounts it?

After this I was ok, and actually did get help for my PND, but no-one EVER took how I had feel seriously, and I wanted to because it was so utterly horrible. I wanted to purge myself of the thoughts, and everyone just smiled sweetly at me and moved on. I'm fairly confident that I am not more evil than the next person, but I kind of wanted someone to be really angry with me and they just weren't.

As I said. Hindsight is wonderful, and also, sadly, too late in this tragic case (and it is tragic for all, tho most of all for those kids).

I agree some may be so unwell that they are incapable of rational thought. However, just as often, killing one's children is a rational conclusion to the dilemma of whether to kill oneself leaving them motherless or to stay and inflict an empty shell of a mother on them and the abuse that that would be. That is robbing one's children of a life just as much as murdering them is. Don't forget that suicide is an end to pain and misery. Why wouldn't a mother want to offer her children that too if it is a viable option for herself?

Of course, the right thing to do would be to give them a chance of a life with capable non-birth parents. Intelligent, knowledgeable women will fear this because they will know the care system does not guarantee such a rosy text book outcome. Some will still choose murder due to this knowledge and some will choose murder because they are indeed too selfish to allow themselves to take that chance of a happy future for their children without them; their mother.

if she did,indeed murder her own kids.....i wonder why she chose to stab?? it seems unlikely to me....and to get all 3 together long enough,how did she manage all this? i cant comprehend how......'depressed' or otherwise!

for me it doesnt fit..... the mum who used,or allegedly used nytol,that way made more sense if i have to think it through!

Having been depressed before I can understand a little of the suffering involved. Suicidal? No, not really. Crazy, out-of-control, irrational, terrified, angry? Yes. I have every sympathy towards those who suffer even worse than I did.

But at the risk of sounding glib, how does that profit us? To have sympathy for someone suffering like this doesn't move us any further forward does it? Unless to have sympathy is to say that we just have to accept that such dreadful crimes are sometimes committed and just shrug our shoulders and look sad.

I think any sympathy should be directed towards more action if that is at all possible. In other words the acceptance that depression can lead people to do bad things should not lead us just to feel sympathy and accepting those bad things. It should make us challenge things more because those bad things are still bad, no matter what their root cause. So just judging and leaving it at that is as bad as feeling only sympathy and leaving it at that.

Clearly children at risk always have to be a priority, even if the action is only temporary while the parent/carer receives appropriate support. And maybe they need to react more quickly? I think in the case referred to here there was already some concern for the children. I am not advocating the permanent removal of children, but something other needs to happen surely?

As a child (aged about 10) my parents went through an utterly horrific divorce - the behaviour on my father's side was disgusting (he froze the joint bank account leaving us penniless, took the family car leaving my mother unable to get my chronically ill brother to hospital, attempted to get my mother arrested and dragged through the courts... all sorts went on). My mother reacted dreadfully in terms of her health to this - she esssentially stopped eating (photos of her at the time show her utterly skeletal), and the only "food" she got was me making her cups of milky coffee.

At one point she sat on the phone to my idiot father begging him for some money and made the threat that she'd stockpiled enough pills in the house to make me and my brother take an overdose and then take one herself. I was sat at the top of the stairs and heard all of this - it scared me at the time (she knew I overheard), but I don't bear bitterness to her for it, I understand how low she was going and how desperate things had driven her.

Thankfully we had a good GP, she had an understanding employer and she had the prescence of mind to throw absolutely everything in tablet form out of the house - but I can understand how someone can be driven that low. I've suffered crippling attacks of depression myself - it's truly something you can only understand the sense of irrationality and blackness when you've been through that black pit yourself really.

I am no expert in these matters but I suspect the lady in the news story that this thread is eluding to, was "protecting" her children.

There is obviously a back story to this that is only now coming out.

She was mentally unstable and felt she had to protect her bear cubs from danger. Though she did it in the most extreme way.

Not empathising of course, just trying to see if I can make sense of it.

Sorry I've been away - with a friend all day.

The point is that these cases should make us, as a society, take depression more seriously, to protect the children of women (primarily) who are the main carers and who are seriously ill with depression.

Hobbgoblin has put it absolutely perfectly. When I've been in a crisis, my children have always been at the front of my mind. What is the best thing for them? They are being damaged seeing me like this. I can't stop myself. I am falling deeper and deeper into this crisis and I can't pull myself out. All the time my children are hurting. I could call social services and get them taken away, but that would hurt them even more, and cause huge amounts of damage. I could get someone round and then I could disappear for a few days until I was straight. But that would harm the children too. I could kill myself so they never had to see me in that state again. But that would be worse than everything. Or I could stop the pain for them and for me by just killing us all.

Thankfully for me, before I've ever got to the last option, I've had enough knowledge and presence of mind left to call Samaritans or a friend or my mum. But the point is, I can see how people can get to that state. And I've only ever got that low when I already knew I was ill, and knew the process of it. What if a mum didn't understand it? Didn't know why she was screaming in emotional pain? Didn't have any friends she could trust? Or know about the Samaritans?

FWIW, like I said initially, I can't understand this woman's MO, and none of us can know why she did it. But women do kill themselves and their family when in the grip of a depressive crisis, and the times it happens, which are thankfully very rare, should not be making us rant and rave about what an evil woman she was, but think 'what are we, as a society, doing wrong so that women who are depressed can get to this state without the right support to protect them and their children? What do we need to learn and change?'

And yes, we should feel huge sympathy for these women. To be so, so low that this feels like the best (only?) option must feel like absolute hell on earth - emotional pain so awful it hurts physically.