Brought back to blogging by horrible headlines

I know, I know, I've been a bad blogger lately. Bad blogger! One of the headlines today has me upset enough to start posting again. Did you all see the poor woman in Texas who hanged herself and her 4 little girls? Here's the story.

I participate on a few mothering message boards online, and the discussions there about this woman have me almost as horrified as the story itself. Everyone wants to attack the mother, to criminalize what seems to be pretty obviously an act of literal insanity. Her youngest child was 8 months old, which makes this incident, like the one involving Andrea Yates, sound a lot like post-partum psychosis. People having psychotic episodes do not act with conscious will. If it turns out that she did have PPP, then she literally could not control what happened. I'm not sure why that's hard to grasp - maybe the prevalence of "lower-grade" mental illnesses, like depression and anxiety, have made people believe that truly insane people are similarly able to function at some level. The fact that the process of her actions was so horrific is MORE confirmation, not less, that hers were the actions of a completely deranged mind. Yes, I pity people who are so irretrievably, chemically, physically, through-no-fault-of-their-own SICK. I pity the life I imagine she had and I pity the way that it ended. If someone had a seizure behind the wheel and ran off of a bridge and killed herself and her children, no one would call her a monster - sick people are not sick on purpose.

Aaaaaaaaaand....I'm back!