another mom runs amok

What help is there for these disturbed women?

I've heard of waking up on the wrong side of the bed, but this tragedy happened at night, evidently. Weird...

No other primate mothers are expected to have the sole responsibility of child care, nor do mothers in most human cultures. The nuclear family places an ridiculous amount of stress on mothers.

Not that that in any way excuses or explains these particular incidents, but we are pretty much pioneering a new way of child-rearing in the west in the 20th/21st century.

Maybe it's me, but why do these things tend to happen in Texas? Is God's voice more clear in Texas? Is it cause of Bush and his "Faith Based Agenda"? Something is definitely amiss.

Random thought: What are the drinking water requirements in Texas? Less, more, same as rest of the country? Just curious.

another mom runs amok
CNN:

Sheriff: Mother said God told her to kill sons
Monday, May 12, 2003 Posted: 2:45 PM EDT (1845 GMT)



Deanna LaJune Laney

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Story Tools



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TYLER, Texas (CNN) -- A church choir member charged with killing two of her three sons has shown emotions ranging from hysteria to stunned silence as she sits in an East Texas jail cell, Smith County Sheriff J. B. Smith said Monday.

According to Smith, Deanna LaJune Laney told authorities that God told her to kill her children.

Laney faces capital murder charges in the deaths of her 8- and 6-year-old sons who Smith said "had been severely beaten in the head with what appeared to be a rock."

"She goes from a fetal position of crying, to walking around the cell singing gospel music. She stops and prays, then she goes into a crying hysteria," Smith told CNN's American Morning. "She all of a sudden realizes what she's done, then she'll go into a flatline, blank stare."

A third son, 14-month-old Aaron, was in critical condition Monday at Dallas Children's Hospital, and Laney faces aggravated assault charges in his beating, according to the sheriff's department.

Smith said that after the killings, Laney made a 911 call on her cellular phone and spoke in a "very calm, matter-of-fact way. She told a dispatcher, 'I've killed my boys,'" Smith said.

Bail has been set at $3 million, and a lawyer has been appointed for Laney, he said.

A sheriff's department spokeswoman said deputies responded at 12:52 a.m. Saturday to the New Chapel Hill home, about seven miles outside of Tyler.

When officers arrived, they entered the house and found Aaron in his crib, bludgeoned and with a pillow over his head, but still breathing. Laney was not there, but continued to talk calmly on the phone, Smith said.

Officers found the woman, wearing bloody clothes, in a wooded area about 100 yards behind her house, the sheriff said.

Laney described the location where her other two children could be found but refused to go there herself, he said.

Her husband was apparently asleep inside the house during the attack because he came walking out "in his nightclothes," the sheriff said.

Smith said the children's father was still in shock and has not yet been interviewed, but investigators hope to speak to him Monday. Laney's "emotions are wide and varied," he said.

He said the Laneys were a "very stable, loving family," and the suspect has no history of mental illness.

"Any time you're dealing with children, it's such a devastating thing," Smith said. "It's so emotional to see something like this that makes absolutely no sense"

Neighbors, too, were at a loss to explain what went wrong.

"There's no way in the world that I would believe she would do this without something taking over her and something snapping in her," a neighbor said.

"It is absolutely devastating to the neighborhood," he said.

The woman is sane. If she was coherent enough to realize what a telephone was for, and use it to dial 9-1-1 then she was sane enough to know that killing her children was wrong. If God told her to do it and she believed it was the right thing to do then why did she dial 9-1-1? Because, she knew what she had done was wrong!

Sheesh, that's some convoluted reasoning. Plenty of schizo/psycho people have enough marbles remining to do things like dial a number and talk, drive, have sex, etc. Doesn't make 'em any less crazy. I'm sure the courts will deluge her with plenty of "experts" from both sides to figure that out, so we'll know then who's right (or whose opinion gets validated, at least).

Yeah well of course the courts and the public will deem her insane/crazy because we just cannot imagine that a sane person could do that. There will be no "who's right" here because sane or insane the woman only has to act like a whacko and she will be locked up for this crime.

Instead of being getting the death penalty that is.

IMO, mental disorders have no correlation with political affiliation predominant in any particular territory. Of course, religious person would attribute acoustic delusions to God's will, while an atheist or an agnostic suffering from the same health conditions, may think that this is a command of aliens (just an example). I strongly believe that this accident has much to do with mental diseases that may happen to people of any political or religious affiliation, and notthing to do with politics, general crime or, heavens forbid, U.S. Administration. The woman that killed her kids is obviously mentally sick (or, as a version, pretends being like this while having done what she has done for some other personal reasons of her own).
Of course, final diagnosis of this woman's conditions may be made only by medical professionals appointed for this purpose by the court.
10 years ago some nurse in Israel drowned her daughters in the bathtub, and refused to give any explanations. Psychiatric examination showed that she developed a severe type of schizophrenia, and as far as I know, she is still being kept in the closed mental health institution. She was not religious at all, by the way.

perhaps at best, a spurious correlation, but there are some similarities with the same situation last year with the texas mom that drowned her children, a devoutly religious family coupled with home schooling leaving mom to cope with not only homemaker but teacher and "christian wife of the church" could possibly be a major stressor, just a thought.

Schizophrenia is a genetically determined disorder characterized by wrong neuromediators (acethylcholine, GABA, dopamine, etc.) metabolism in brain tissues. Unlike neurosis, it cannot be induced by social environment, education, etc.

Or could feminism have something to do with it? Are women not content to be responsible for the child-rearing alone? What about women who also work outside the home? Is there totally too much stress in a regular family home these days? And if so, then why do women continue to have more than one or two children if they cannot handle them?
2001 Fox Article.
Sometimes I hear that everyone but the mother is to blame for her actions. Is that really an acceptable excuse?

Stress has nothing to do with this either, IMO. All this story looks like a manifestation of the severe organic brain disease. It was latent for a long period of time (meanwhile this woman married, gave birth to kids, etc.) but on some particular stage it came out. The reasons for exacerbation may be various, hormonal, for example.

Not at all, and I merely posted what I did using this subject as a point of departure. But there has been a gradual acceptance in the scientific community in the last 30 years of the once-radical notion that, at least in nature, a mother would not sacrifice her own well-being for that of her children. Ultimately, self-preservation wins out.

In virtually all primate -- and this includes human -- communities, children are raised principally by the biological mother but with considerable assistance from other individuals (allo-mothers is the term, and in human societies includes siblings, grandparents, and other adults in the social group). The notion we've developed of the self-sacrificing mother who can be expected to bear the entire burden of child-rearing is flawed.

My, my, but we are jumping the gun a bit, aren't we, in diagnosing this poor woman? Let's wait at least until the cable news experts weigh in before we label her as schizophrenic, having an organic brain disease, or just plain evil...

I'm not saying the mother is self-sacrificing (all those some may perceive themselves to be). I am wondering if feminism has changed the females state of mind to not be as accepting of her position as lead parent and to actually resent her male partner for not giving an equal amount of time to the process. Is there less patience on her part? With the children the likely recipients of her frustrations?

And I'm not speaking about this particular case. I am wondering more about a general trend.

"Medea" is a very, very old play. Mothers killing children is nothing new. The ones that do should never see freedom again. But if we just lock them up, dust off our hands, and see our work as done, we've done nothing to prevent it happening again.

If, instead, we ask ourselves why these things happen, and make efforts to produce conditions in which they are less likely to happen again, we have done something to improve our lot as a species.