To be disgusted by murder-suicide reporting?

[FuckOffWithYourEllipses]

Same old story. Elderly man struggling to cope with caring for his ill wife. Violently murders her - battery and strangulation in this case - then kills himself. And the media report it as a mercy killing.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15392635/Retired-salesman-dead-ill-wife-800k-seaside-home-Huntingdons-mercy-killing-suicide.html#

Nothing in the article indicates that this poor woman wanted her husband to end her life.

There is no mention of her being in unbearable pain, of saying she’d had enough, or anything like that. It just says HE was struggling to cope and that her behaviour was difficult.

I totally get that the situation would have been hell on earth for them both. And I get that he would have felt overwhelmed and despairing. But surely that doesn’t mean it’s somehow an act of mercy for him to violently murder her??

All the comments are going on about how sad it is for them both, how sad that he felt forced to kill her, how terrible it must have been for him and so on.

I just find it upsetting how he’s automatically given empathy and the benefit of the doubt even though he murdered his wife in the most violent and terrifying way.

No one is in a 'pulpit', but yes I will judge someone who has bludgeoned his sick defenceless wife to death.

Adult social care ……lol

Well legally it wasn’t up to him, ok.

but morally, well, he was at the coal face with her illness 24/7, had loved her for 40 years, I’d say that actually it could have reasonably been up to him to decide. I mean morally, who else should it be up to?

Im not saying he was necessarily right, but I can see that it’s really not clear cut

Where would he live?

I agree. He could have taken his own life and left her at the mercy of the social care system. Obviously we don’t know, but I suspect he took the more loving option of taking her with him.

She wouldn’t be able to get to dignatas and if he took her he could be charged

that’s why we need a dignatas here!

There aren’t really any drugs that will definitely do it

overdoses can go very wrong and you can end up in terrible pain

Agree. He also could have left her at any point. But he didn’t. He must have loved her very much.

'Obviously we don’t know, but I suspect he took the more loving option of taking her with him'

The more loving option?? He snapped and bludgeoned her then strangled her!

But she did have Huntington’s

Society definitely seems to be moving toward a model whereby people are divided into ‘carers’ or ‘cared for’.

Thread after thread about elderly parents needing high level care for 10+ years because we throw the kitchen sink at keeping people alive well past their sell by date. Thread after thread about neurodiverse children who attack their parents, trash the house, will never be independent whether that’s due to learning disabilities or ‘anxiety’ type MH issues. Parents at their wits end being squeezed for every last drop of care with no end in sight and ‘I dread waking up every morning, but they need me’. Their lives just ruined and the torture never ending because carers are basically considered nothing but support humans for their needy loved one.

I think this problem is only going to get worse.

i suspect if his suicide hadn't worked then he would have been judged "unfit to plead" or there would have been a defence of diminished reponsibility. All I would say speaking from a professional POV not a personal one, is if you haven't been there, don't judge.

Yes, more loving than leaving her alone to suffer with her unbearable illness

I am not sure you are right.

I know that my DH will want to hang on to the very end, whatever happens. So me bludgeoning him to death becuase I snap or have had enough would be morally wrong.

If we had a pact that he wants me to kill him when his condition deteriorates past a certain point, well that would be another matter. Though I still think bludgeoning him to death would not be acceptable.

Anyway, I am stepping away from the thread now as I am finding some of the views a bit disturbing!

Omg do you know how awful these arrangements can be and how unskilled the carers are (not their fault - minimum wage and no training)

even if they come twice a day for an hour - you still have 12 times that left to do your self

a lot of people have no idea how it is for Carers

oh yeah and carers allowance is about £75 a week - total postage when you look at what is charged in residential care

you wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve seen - a plastic bottle full of hot water in a bed! - from the care plan “hot water bottle”

I mean that there are more controls and it is fairly hard to know or do it with existing medication - I guess unless she was on morphine

if it goes wrong you can end up disabled or having a slow and painful death over weeks

its not a straight forward thing where you take drugs and then float off with no pain on your bed

it’s not accessible to many and comes with a low completion rate

Because a decent one is £3k a week???

even then…

they may be property rich and income poor

he wanted to live with his wife?

he would feel guilty?

just a few possibilities

Those assessments can take up to a year to happen!

Oh I know. And then you get a couple of non-English speaking “carers” turn up who have very little cultural knowledge to understand how to converse with your loved one.

Yes that’s what happened with putting a plastic bottle full of hot water in the bed - they took it too literally - not their fault but obv dangerous

What he did was wrong but I prefer the reports of this to focus on the stress of caring instead of it being as black and white as him being an evil murderer. The burden on carers is huge and largely ignored, even by other family members. Too often, one person is left carrying the load whilst the rest of the family are 'too busy' 'not my responsibility'. Adult Social Care budgets are consistently being squeezed so the wait time for assessments is long and the support available is minimal. Care provision is generally shit so people are terrified to leave their vulnerable loved ones in the care of others as they can't be trusted. All the while we're in a society becoming more and more individualised, people don't want to pay tax for public services, they don't want to help out their family and neighbours so I can't see things getting better anytime soon.