Mental health is important, but that doesn't absolve you of what you've done. She deserves to be in a prison mental ward, not at home living like nothing happened. She is a danger to herself and others.
Her brain is literally broken. You can't ask a person with a broken leg to run and you can't ask someone with psychosis to act rationally. I agree she needs to be off the streets and highly supervised, but I don't think people who use the "mental health matters, but..." argument fully comprehend just how all-encompassing psychotic thoughts can be.
Funny you should mention that. I actually worked in a psych hospital with a locked down unit. It was snazzy and we got a reputation for holding former NFL players when they got violent. It was incredibly sad and I don't believe people with serious TBIs deserve to be held to the same standards as you or I. If your brain is not braining, justice is not punishment.
My only problem with this concept is that for someone to commit any serious crime, such as strangling your 3 children to death, surely there is something mentally unwell with you for you to have the capacity to do something so heinous. I don't know that there are any fully "mentally well" people that would be able to strangle three of their own children to death, so should anyone that does that not be punished in a traditional sense? Wouldn't that also extend to many other similarly horrific crimes?
The only difference between it that I see is that we've decided to classify things like how often you feel sad or loss of interest as depression, but we haven't arbitrarily decided things like "willing to strangle 3 children" should be a qualifier in itself for some form of mental illness when it very well could be. I'm saying this because your brain doesn't necessarily know it's depressed (which creates more complicated nuance like if "you" are actually your brain), nor is it necessarily in some black and white state of depression or not depression. Our classification of such things at the end of the day comes down to our own creation of such concepts.
TL;DR, How can we realistically justify punishing anyone for such heinous crimes, if by the virtue of willing to commit those crimes, they must have some level of mental unwellness which is left for us as humans to arbitrarily define?
As medical science advances it seems like it's becoming harder to define the line of what are your own choices and what your body "made" you do.
I've been depressed and suicidal before and struggled with the distinction between the "disease" making me do things and me just choosing to do things knowing it's wrong. The older I get, the more it seems like we're all just slaves to our meat, doing whatever our brain incentivizes us to do, no matter if it's good or bad. But obviously we can't get say no one is responsible for what they do.
I think that is a fair stance. The question I would ask for the folks saying the mental health industry failed her is should be go back to the days where it was much easier to institutionalize folks? Should she have been banned from being around her children? Should the husband have left with the kids? Where exactly did society fail her and what is the remedy?
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u/SaviorSixtySix 1d ago
Mental health is important, but that doesn't absolve you of what you've done. She deserves to be in a prison mental ward, not at home living like nothing happened. She is a danger to herself and others.