Mother: Drunk. Children: Dead of starvation

[casdave]

I don’t think you can possibly say she is or is not mentally ill.

You are judging her state of mind by your reality, which is that you would not or could not do what she has actually done, but, its just that her standards may be totally differant to yours, to the point of complete incompatability, this may not make her mentally ill at all.

Evil perhaps, utterly selfish, but not necassarily mentally ill.

If you wonder if she is evil, ask yourslef, if what happend to those children was evil or not, then ask who is primarily responsible.

Ohh, she’s evil alright.

[Cerri]

@casdave

I don’t think you can possibly say she is or is not mentally ill.

You are judging her state of mind by your reality, which is that you would not or could not do what she has actually done, but, its just that her standards may be totally differant to yours, to the point of complete incompatability, this may not make her mentally ill at all.

Evil perhaps, utterly selfish, but not necassarily mentally ill.

If you wonder if she is evil, ask yourslef, if what happend to those children was evil or not, then ask who is primarily responsible.

Ohh, she’s evil alright.

On the same note you addressed me, I don’t think you can possibly say she’s not mentally ill.

[Cerri]

That is to say, since neither of us know the woman in question, neither of us can say what her motivating factor was.

Maybe she was evil, maybe she was mentally ill. I don’t see how you can definitively say she was one, and completely rebuff the notion that she might possibly be the other, when the evidence could conclude either.

IMO, and having dealt with mentally ill people in my family, as well as dealing with debilitating depression in my past (obviously not to that extreme, but I quit my job and laid on my couch for 6 months straight at one point, knowing that that was a big factor in my relationship at the time self-imploding. I wanted to do something about it, I just couldn’t. As in, I literally couldn’t get off the couch till it was too late.), I think there’s enough evidence to at least suspect severe mental illness, instead of just outright condemning her for being evil.

She may very well be, but I don’t think the articles are conclusive, and neither of us are mental health doctors.

[Farmwoman]

@Cerri

I think it’s clear the woman is seriously mentally ill. There’s no way an even semi- rational person, even an semi-rational alchoholic person, just covers up their dead child and goes back to drinking without calling help.

That, in my not-being-a-doctor opinion denotes some serious mental illness far beyond even your run-of-the-mill alchoholism.

I think it’s not clear at all.

You seem to be suggesting that no sane person would do this, therefore she must have been seriously mentally ill. Using this logic, there is no sanity (or responsibility, for that matter) on murderer’s row. No rational person would ever knowingly take the life of another human being, nor would one allow a life to slowly snuff out while life giving/saving measures are readily at hand. Once one has committed an act we deem irrational enough, we have to assign blame to a mental illness, since no ‘rational person would ever do this’

I find this a little disturbing. It seems satanic vapors and demonic possession have been reintroduced into our culture in the form of mental illness.

[don_t_ask]

I doubt that she even approaches evil, but she is certainly pathetic. It is very common to find that alcoholics are either neurotics or psychotics using alcohol as self-medication to ameliorate their behaviour/thinking. There is no concious intent behind this but it is common to find that amiable drunks when dried out are bat-shit crazy, and their drunkenness lets them function in the world.

This woman was .40 on waking and immediately staggered to the closet to grab a beer. People who can get that intoxicated know that they are killing themselves but simply don’t care. I have nursed people like her and they have no idea what they are doing.

Read between the lines of her social situation - apparently she had people to complain about her but no-one to do anything to help her. There is no reference to family other than the estranged father of other children, no concerned friends who offered to help out but were refused, no friendly neighbours who dropped around to see that all was well, no job so no workmates concerned about her decline.

Her life was so bad that a jail term will be a luxury.

And she may be evil, she may be a monster but I’ll bet that if that is the case she was drinking to keep the monster away.

[Kalhoun]

@Larry Mudd

To be clear here, her kids had evidently been dead for several days. They didn’t die while she was passed out, they died while she was on a long, long bender. If she didn’t know her kids were dead, it wasn’t because she was unconscious when they died, it’s because she hadn’t even looked in the bassinet next to her bed for a few days.

A fine distinction, maybe, but it’s not like it happened while she was sleeping.

At .40, it would not surprise me if she forgot she had children. Her brain is functioning at the survival level at this point. That amount of booze would kill most adult men. I’m horrified and sickened by the ordeal as well, but I still have the capacity for compassion.

[Kalhoun]

@Tranquilis

Actually, this is very much different. This is not a point-event, but rather it took many days to kill these children. Each and every time she opened one of those cans of beer, she also had the chance to decide whether or not to feed her children. That is at least 307 chances to decide to feed the survivor, and certainly many scores of times for each of the dead children.

Anyone that passes up that many chances to save their children’s life is clearly demonstrating depraved indifference. Showing depraved indifference to the life of her children is clearly evil. Small ‘e’ evil, perhaps, but evil nonetheless.

You say that as if she had the capacity to think beyond ingesting beer! At that stage of the game, alcoholism takes over everything. She was probably in blackout mode. In fact, I’d be surprised if she wasn’t.

[Skywatcher]

@don't ask

There is no reference to family other than the estranged father of other children…

From the link in the OP:

A third son, who is 2½ years old, was found alive in the apartment. He was placed in the care of his paternal grandmother.

[Tranquilis]

@Kalhoun

You say that as if she had the capacity to think beyond ingesting beer! At that stage of the game, alcoholism takes over everything. She was probably in blackout mode. In fact, I’d be surprised if she wasn’t.

Certainly she had the capacity to think beyond the next beer - she covered her dead child after finding it. That clearly demonstrates mental activity beyond the next beer.

Also - Being in blackout does not prevent thought or activity, though it certainly does erase any memory of activity. My siblings and I were fed, clothed, and otherwise given basic care by a woman who spent whole weeks in blackout, and was frequently literally falling down.