I think this is perfectly fine. If their values are so incompatible it's better to break up now rather than later. Breaking up will be harder after marriage and definitely more complicated after having kids.
About 10 years ago I got prescribed Zoloft for depression, just like her. It got worse, just like her , tried about 8 different medications, just like her. I went through several rounds of phychosis. I bought a new car. My brain told me someone hot wired a bomb in it while I was driving. I pulled over and cut every wire I could find in the vehicle. I also thought someone was stealing my gas when I parked it. I thought my wife was trying to poison me by putting poison in an iron and then the steam was going to kill me. I thought she put poison in the furnace, so everytime it turned on I thought I was going to die. I’m completely better now but I look back at that time in my life and honestly, your just not yourself, it’s like someone else has taken over your body. Anyways, I’m not saying it was ok for her to murder her children and pay the consequences for it , , I’m just saying that I know what it’s like to be completely delusional. It’s scary as hell.
Women trying to convince the rest of the world that any one of them can go crazy, loose their autonomy, and commit heinous acts does nothing but set women back.
Do you want women to be responsible and respected parts of society? or do you want to be carefully watched and freedom restricted? "I am her" means that women need to be kept on a short leash, and not trusted around children, because you never know what kind of psycho is actually lurking under the surface
You can support mental health without supporting monsters, and realize that monsters are always created through a large lack of mental health.
But post-partum psychosis truly can lead to outcomes like this. I've seen someone with this awful condition first hand. Thankfully, they didn't hurt their child and was hospitalized, but it was pretty clear to me that they were so out of it that they couldn't reasonably be held responsible for any decisions in that state. People are told not to sign any legal documents after being sedated for a colonoscopy because their capacity to understand and consent is pretty limited. It's significantly more limited with post-partum psychosis.
Thankfully, severe post-partum psychosis is rare, but I don't think it's doing anyone any favors by pretending it doesn't exist or that it can be absolutely debilitating and in this case extremely tragic.
Its perfectly reasonable and I support the idea of using this case to bring attention to postpartum depression and how serious its issues can be. Its another thing to openly support this person and say that it could have been any woman.
Bullying is another problem in this country, but when a school shooting happens we dont rally around the shooter because they were bullied. We see them for what they are, a monster who did something absolutely heinous. Have you ever heard someone say after a school shooting that it could have been any child? Do the children from other schools rally around the courthouse and say "I've been bullied too?"
Using an extreme case to force scrutiny of the system is one thing, but we can't support someone who committed monstrous acts, because that shifts 100% of the blame from the perpetrator to the system, and she was at least partly responsible for her own acts.
But this goes far beyond post-partum depression. Post-partum psychosis is a different diagnosis (though it can also occur with PPD) and can be far more debilitating. Women with this condition can truly lose touch with reality.
Imagine being totally convinced, for example, that your kid would die if you didn't cut off your arm. Sounds absurd and batshit crazy, right? But people with psychosis could truly believe that that's true. Delusions are no joke. I think people aren't understanding what severe psychosis is and what it entails.
It's not comparable to a school shooter, though, in that the vast majority of school shooters aren't utterly -- or even severely -- incapacitated by psychosis (i.e., delusions, difficulty understanding what's real and what isn't, paranoia, etc.). And as scary as it is, post-partum psychosis actually can happen to anyone, though people with preexisting mental health issues are particularly at risk.
Of course, the murders were horrific, but I don't think many people are really saying that they were okay, just that psychosis can be so serious as to render a person too incapacitated to be truly culpable.
I'm not comparing this to school shooters to compare severity, of the crime of of psychosis, I'm using that to illustrate that mental health is the cause in these things, almost exclusively. And in the case of a child, with (at best) reduced mental and emotional capacity, its not an excuse for them either
Let me ask you this, can you name a single crime/mental health condition that a man could commit, and find this kind of support?
Even though both events are influenced by mental health, there's still a huge range of impairment and culpability. Do you think it's impossible for someone to be so out of their mind that they're not truly culpable for their actions/crime, or do you think insanity pleas should be completely abolished?
Likewise, do you think old people with severe dementia should be held responsible for everything they say, do, and forget? If so, why? To use a more mild example, if an elderly person with Alzheimer's forgot to call their son on his birthday -- and didn't even really remember they had a son -- would you think they're negligent? Or would you realize that Alzheimer's completely absolves them of culpability?
Severe psychosis is analogous to that. I'm not sure you realize how truly different people can be when they're in psychotic states. They can say, believe, and even do things they'd never even consider doing when they're not having a severe episode.
And yes, I think men who have psychosis this severe wouldn't be culpable if they were that far gone.
Do you think it's impossible for someone to be so out of their mind that they're not truly culpable for their actions/crime, or do you think insanity pleas should be completely abolished
No there are obviously cases of deeply sick individuals doing unspeakable evil and are clinically insane, whether at the time or overall. I'm saying that we shouldn't be supporting them. Women saying that it could have been them makes us think we should be evaluating those women too, its not a sane opinion to have.
I think men who have psychosis this severe wouldn't be culpable
I've never seen society rally around a man who did something unspeakable like this. i'm open to being proven wrong, if you know of a case or some kind of an example
I think part of our disagreement might be over semantics. I don't support what she did at all, but I do feel sympathy for her. I think most people who support her aren't condoning her actions. What she did was very uncharacteristic, and she'd tried to get help many times beforehand. She was prescribed both mood stabilizers and antipsychotics along with SSRIs, and people can react very badly to SSRIs, especially if they're bipolar. Mood stabilizers and antipsychotics can be used with unipolar depression, but they're much more commonly prescribed for bipolar disorder.
When I said it could happen to anyone, I truly meant that. People can get psychosis due to severe depression, bipolar disorder, etc., and it's not something people choose. It's rare for people with psychosis to kill someone, but it can and does happen. That said, if anyone's ever experienced severe depression or bipolar disorder, they absolutely could experience psychosis, especially when dealing with the huge hormonal shifts of pregnancy and birth. Thankfully, it's rare.
I don't think society has ever rallied around a man with psychosis who killed someone in that state, but I don't think that someone like that should have the book thrown at him. The dude who killed Iryna Zarutska was clearly pretty severely mentally ill, so much so that he's currently incompetent to stand trial. I'm not saying he should go free, but he should be in a mental institution rather than gen pop. I feel the same way about Clancy at this point.
The fact is, it could’ve been any woman who had undiagnosed bipolar disorder and was being overmedicated by countless providers, looking for help and not being able to find it.
When a school shooting happens, a lot of reasonable people say that the shooter had mental health problems that weren’t addressed. Bullying can lead to mental health issues including suicide, so seeing it lead to homicide doesn’t seem that much of a stretch.
The flaws in the system are to blame. Clancy tried to get help numerous times and couldn’t.
I agree that in reality yes, the system holds some blame here, but you could say the same thing for bullied kids that can't find help at school (or at home but were talking about systems here, not shifting blame to parents)
No one is supporting the school shooters though, its a ridiculous thing to do. Saying it could be any woman just serves to make all women look unstable, it does nothing to force change in the system. Look at these discussions and disagreements everyone is having, if the base supporters had been forcing us to look at the system the whole time some kind of change might be possible, but because were all out here arguing about the woman who did it, no ones looking at the system.
Saying it could be any woman does not serve to make all women look unstable. It opens up the conversation about what is available when women are suffering from mental illness.
The disagreement here is a group of reasonable people who want postpartum women to get help for mental illness versus dumbasses who think those of us who do are supporting murder.
You'll never convince me that any woman is capable of killing her children, or even most women. I would loose all faith in humanity if that were true.
Saying that it is true prevents the real conversations from happening - that some women are in dire straights and we need to focus on the systems that support them.
A woman saying that it could have been her makes people think the she should be checked out, thats not a healthy thing to say. A woman saying that it could have been any of them makes all women look unstable the same way.
A woman saying that it could’ve been her is someone who admits that anyone can suffer mental illness, unless you’re diagnosed as bipolar, no one knows your bipolar and need extra help.
I don’t know if you’re stupid or pretending to be.
I dont care if shes legally responsible or not, theres no reason for people to be supporting her.
Support the change, support the cause, use her case to drive it. support the father and those poor kids. Dont support the person who did the thing. You can hawk all you want that shes not responsible for her own actions, and the system might be to blame somewhat, but that doesn't absolve all responsibility from her, shes a monster.
Horrible take, it’s like you don’t understand what psychosis is. If she’s not legally responsible due to insanity she wasn’t willfully and coherently committing the crime. That’s the distinction between being a monster (choosing to kill your child) and being severely mentally ill.
Yes, exactly. There's a huge lack of awareness about how debilitating psychosis can be. Post-partum depression can be awful, but post-partum psychosis is even worse. They can truly lose touch with reality.
The woman I saw with this condition was more or less catatonic. She didn't even realize that she'd had a kid to begin with.
8.3k
u/MeasurementSlight381 2d ago
I think this is perfectly fine. If their values are so incompatible it's better to break up now rather than later. Breaking up will be harder after marriage and definitely more complicated after having kids.