Why Mothers Kill

Last week a mother in Winnipeg allegedly killed her two young children and then disappeared. On Monday, her body was pulled from a river nearby. The river water hadn’t had time to wick dry on her lifeless body before bloggers and authors left, right and centre were writing about how they sympathised with and identified with the mother.

I’m not going to name the mother, because frankly I think her children deserve memorial more than she does and her family deserves privacy more than we need the salacious details. I’m not going to name the articles I read either, because it’s obvious that these writers picked this subject to write about because they wanted to ride the wave of public attention and get some more “hits” for their columns.

I am going to name the supposed cause of this whole tragic incident, however. According to the media and those writers who disgusted me, this woman killed her children and then herself because she had Post-Partum Depression (PPD). Several writers wrote an “it could have been me” type response because they too had PPD. Some who didn’t wrote that they had had fleeting moments of murderous rage towards their children as well and there but for the grace of God go they.

I’ve got one response. Malarkey.

Actually, I could respond stronger than that. These articles filled me with a murderous rage of my own. A man is grieving the loss of his two young, innocent children and an obviously tortured wife and some people think they can jump on the national focus of attention and get themselves some book sales or Facebook fans. 

It disgusts me.

But what disgusts me more is how each of these articles feeds the idea that women are somehow not responsible adults, able to make rational choices, because we are at the whim of our hormones. Post-pregnancy hormones make us think horrible things, apparently. I remember some of those. And yet, I didn’t kill anyone. As a rational adult, I was able to control myself so my thoughts and feelings were just that, and did not turn into actions. That, in my opinion, is the difference between children and adults. We are able to control our physical responses to emotional and mental stimuli much better than children. But if women can’t, then I guess we’re all just children?

What really disgusts me, though, is the way the media and these writers reported that this woman had Post-Partum Depression and drew lines from that diagnosis to her behaviour. A lot of women have PPD. It has been suggested and shown in studies that men get PPD as well. PPD does not make a person a killer, any more than autism, mental delay, bipolar disorder, or a slew of other stigmatised disorders do.

What is a mother diagnosed with PPD going to think if we spread the idea that it causes women to kill their children? What mother, experiencing extreme sadness, agitation or obsessive thoughts will seek help if she knows she will be labelled with a disorder that could cause her to kill? What father will be comfortable leaving his children with his wife if he believes that her PPD could make her kill? Reporting this way is a grave disservice to public health and will only traumatise women and their families further.

But don’t take it from me. Jennifer Hartmann, a mother of one beautiful little girl and a woman who was diagnosed with PPD after her birth, says it better than anyone:

PPD is very real, and actually, pointing the finger at PPD for this woman's actions is kind of dangerous for people who have the illness. When I was suffering from PPD/OCD, I obsessed over my child: I was afraid I was a terrible mother, all the while doing more than my share to ensure I was a bloody excellent mother. I had intrusive thoughts that vividly made me think horrible things were happening to my daughter, but they never did. In fact, the reason they were so horrible is that I would never do anything to hurt her and couldn't even stand the thought of it!

If women with PPD see that their illness can cause a woman to leave her children in a bathtub to die and drown herself in a river, it might take them longer to heal. The thoughts of being inadequate would only increase if a PPD sufferer thought she were capable of something like that. Even though I consider myself healed and have been off medication for quite a while now, those old thoughts came back to me when I read the stories that implied this horrible event happened due to PPD. I thought, "that could have been me and my daughter," or even worse, "that could be me, my daughter, and my future child if the PPD is worse next time."

However, if it were a perinatal mood disorder that caused this horrible tragedy, it wouldn't be PPD at all. It would be PPP (Post-Partum Psychosis), a completely different illness. The media's failure to distinguish between the two is actually causing women who do not have psychosis to doubt their ability to keep themselves and their children alive, and that's neither healthy nor fair to these women.

According to a 2010 study by the American Anthropological association, every year 200 women in the United States kill their children. This results in the deaths of about 3 children per day at their mother’s hands.

Numerous studies peg the incidence of Post-Partum Depression in mothers at about 20% (rates vary from 9%-30% depending on the scale used). 

Obviously not every woman with PPD kills their children.

In fact, the much more severe Post-Partum Psychosis occurs in 1-2 out of every 1000 births. There are about 4 million births each year in the United States; meaning approximately 8000 women are diagnosed with PPP each year. This disorder, which causes psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations, disordered behaviour and persistent intrusive thoughts, is much more common than women killing their children.

Neither PPD nor PPP will cause a woman to kill her children. And reporting that either of these disorders is the causative effect is irresponsible and dangerous. I take special umbrage with authors who have suffered from these disorders and state “that could have been me” without stipulating why it wasn’t them.

It is said that women without family and social support, or who suffer from other disorders in addition to PPD or PPP, or who are going through stress in their lives are more likely to kill. And yet, these occurrences also do not cause women to kill. Many women every year go through all of these in confluence and their children are unharmed. And many women who kill – like the woman last week – have close knit family looking out for them and their children.

So how do we know if a woman will kill her children? What I believe is, a woman or person who kills – despite everything else going on in their lives at the time – requires the actual ability to kill. Most of us don’t have that, especially the ability to kill someone we love. It has little to do with motherhood, social situation, or mental illness and everything to do with innate character.

One thing we can be sure of though: of the women currently in prison for killing their children, most report that they said at one time or another that they didn’t feel they should be left alone with their children. Most of them were ignored, or received some help but not enough so that they never spent a moment alone with their children. The woman in Winnipeg had family arriving to help her later that day, and yet she could not hold on that long. If a woman ever states that she does not feel her children are safe alone with her, than we, as a society, need to take that very seriously. A little bit of help from family will not cut it. They truly should not be left alone, even for a moment, with their children.