to feel pity for the mum who killed her kids?

[littlestmummystop]

Obviously it is an unforgivable thing to do..

But sometimes when I see these parent kills kids stories, part of me nods and thinks: There for the Grace of God.

I've never been in the position where I've wanted to do something so terrible. But I have been involved in a horrible, bitter break up, been stuck in the house with a screaming child, been driven to the edge of my sanity by all the responsibility and depressive feelings...

I can see why someone, who IS of a deranged mind, who doesn't have any support can do this.

She'll get villified now and all she needed was help. Those kids were obviously well cared for, for years beforehand. When a good mum turns bad something has gone horribly wrong and it's a shame more people don't help in these situations.

I admire someone who can find pity, I am struggling to.

IF she turns out to very seriously mentally ill I have sympathy in that if your mind has gone excuses dont even come into it,but ATM I an think only of those two poor children

Oh and Janos I agree but there are other types of MH problem of course.

No sympathy here.

YABU

Just watched this on lunchtime news and the only sympathy I have is for the two little mites wrapped in bin bags and put into holdalls, there are no words to adequately express how sad and tragic that is. I pray they are in a better place.

There's really no excuse, if you're that desperate you can just pop down to the police and drop your dcs off....then go and kill yourself.

no sympathy. none at all for her,just seen their little faces on the news

also mentioned she sppoke of her kids on a website....not a mumsnetter i hope. who knows.

"it's every parent's worst nightmare, to see your child dead. i'd rather die a thousand deaths myself."

That's how I feel too.

Since my son was born I've lived through some hideous experiences (homelessness and bankruptcy to name but two).I really do understand how deeply stress can affect a person and how it feels to have your life crumble around you.

I'm saying this to show I'm not speaking glibly or without some personal experience of trauma.

I reserve my sympathy for those poor children who died and the family who have to live with this.

Not one jot of sympathy here.

I hate the way in which mental illness is routinely used as a justification for the most hideous crimes.

She murdered her children. She put them into bags in the boot of her car. Those children will have trusted her. They will have gone to bed at nights knowing they would be safe and that their mummy would protect them and look after them. And she betrayed them.

I have no sympathy for her, none. Not even mental illness is a justification for what she has done.

Ian Brady is mentally ill, Peter Sutcliffe is mentally ill, yet I don't see people calling for empathy for them or what they did. This is no different.

she should have made a btter job of doing herself in imo.

well I've got some sympathy for her... we just don't know yet, what happened.
I think some of these posts are very harsh without the full facts.

I used to try and think a bit deeper about this kind of thing, tried to rationalise it but whats the point?

The MH aspects dont really matter imo - I would imagine EVERYONE who does something despicable to another human being has some level of mental illness?

And I know it sounds like a lazy argument but actually I think its a vital point - the majority of people with mental illness will not cause harm to another person.

Usually, when a man kills his own children, he has a long track record of domestic abuse, of seeing both his children and their mother as objects, posessions, not people. Men who kill their children often do it to torture wives who have refused to take any more abuse or submit to being controlled. This is usually blindingly obvious from the first news story on such an incident.

While women can be abusive parents and abusive partners, it's a lot rarer for a woman to have this sense of ownership over family members, because there is no social-cultural history of women owning their families like this.
What happened in this case, we don;t know yet. PND, pyschotic episode? It'll probably come out in due course.

The men who do it very often/usually commit suicide themselves from what i see in the papers though. Not sure what that means, but it certainly means they can't enjoy watching the upset to the mother IYSWIM. Funny sort of revenge where you destroy yourself too.

i tend to agree with jeremyvile, "The MH aspects dont really matter imo - I would imagine EVERYONE who does something despicable to another human being has some level of mental illness?".

it doesn;t detract from the horror of the crime really.

I also agree with JeremyVile - killers are mentally ill - end of story.

I don't really get the difference between ill and evil to be honest. How can we separate them out?

I suppose if somebody is psychotic, i.e. they have lost touch with reality and they are delusional, then they may be worthy of pity. In extreme states they wouldn't know that they were mentally ill because they don't know what is real and what isn't. Saying that they should have gone to get help is just silly - they are totally unaware that they need it. That is why it is such a dangerous state.

God, I have just realised that this is local to me; the inspector that was interviewed about it in the papers is my DH's boss. Am very glad he is on paternity leave at the moment as he would probably have ended up having to deal with it initially had he been at work

Is there a news report that clarifies if she has MH problems??

Awful and tragic.

She has been detained under guard at Eastbourne DGH. This would only happen if she was injured, I think one report said she had been self harming. There is a psychiatric unit at Eastbourne so I would imagine that's where she is

ISNT: No, for some people suicide is revenge. Very often the cases with these men who kill their families and themselves (and may be the case with some of the far smaller number of women who do it, too) - you don't want to live any more but you are blaming someone for your feelings, so while you want to die, you want to ensure that this person suffers horribly as well.

SGB, you are dead right there. Someone I know found his wife was having an affair, hung himself in the garden. He wrote in the note to her that he hoped the children hated her for the rest of her life for making him kill himself

Can I just add that after knowing someone who committed suicide in a horrendous way (definately no cry for help as booked into a hotel under an assumed name) whom I saw 2 days before she died as she was telling me she felt nothing for anyone anymore. This was a woman who previously adored her children, who loved the holidays whilst the rest of us moaned as she got to spend lots of time with her children.

By the end she was not a mum, wife or even a person so yes, I can understand how a mother can do this to her children if she is mentally ill. -I am not saying this mum is ill, just that some of you who have PND are saying you would never do this. Great for you but when you are so desperate for the pain to go away -yes a lot of depressed/suicidal people liken how they feel to a physical pain that won't go away and this is exactly what my friend said in her suicide letter - you get to that point where you will do anything to escape it. I never thought my friend would have ever said she felt nothing for her children but then I never thought she would actually commit suicide (she openly talked about it for weeks beforehand, trying in several different ways)

Each person's mental illness is particular to them and so is the way they are treated and how they respond to that treatment.

I am not commenting on this particaulr case as we really don't know the full truth just that I can see how it can happen.

SGB that makes sense.

I suppose some people can truly believe that their children are going to have a terrible life for whatever reason (like that poor american woman) or that the children will never recover from losing their mum. Or something.

i suppose it's pointless to try and second guess what goes on in the minds of people who are this unwell.

my post isn't how I meant it.

the first point is to SGB, the other two are general musings on other reasons that people might do this.