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Heart broken
Bunks
Australia Veteran
This just breaks my heart. How could a mother slowly kill her child like this. I am speechless.
There is a link to the blog on there too. It's just beyond belief.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-09/lacey-spears-killed-son-blog-jailed-20-years/6379448
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Comments
I hate to say it...I'm not shocked. Bec of 24 hour news feeds...we see Moms who kill their children/child more often than I care to see. But yes, it happens. I'll ask the same thing we did about the pilot....
Was no one aware of her mentality at all? Was she and other Mothers who do this hide it well....? She didn't just snap bec it was over time...but did anyone notice the need for such drastic attention and what that might mean for people around her?
Yes a sad story.
I do wonder what our world might look like if we could make individuals in corporations and government as legally accountable for harming others as this mentally ill mother was.
In my view, the problem with what you are asking is this idea we have come to that terribly mentally ill people have the right to not be monitored.
I find it bizarre that mentally ill people who are so over the edge that they sleep out in below zero temperatures and freeze to death are allowed to live that way. And yet, if a person logically decides to commit suicide for a good reason, that is illegal.
First we have to define banking greed as mental illness that kills lives, corporate greed as a cult of mental incapacity, government as having severe control issues etc
... my sort of wonder world ...
I think some of the answer (not all) to "How could no one know what was going on?" comes from an extreme level of idiot compassion. They don't want to get someone in trouble in case they are wrong. THey hope the person gets help. They figure their perception is wrong and things can't be that bad. I think people convince themselves not to believe the signs because the implications are horrible. But ignoring them is more so.
Last week, our local police got a report of threats posted on FB by a young local man. From Jan to Mar he threatened to blow up the school, threatened to rape little girls, threatened to take kids hostage, even threatened the president. Doing more digging, I found he has been making some very concerning posts all over the internet for years, and that some locals even copy/pasted his statements and laughed about it, including one that said "It's not rape, it's just surprise sex." So people saw it...and no one reported it until someone happened upon it finally and bothered to call. When some of those people who commented on his posts (including 2 women my age with children in the school) they felt bad because they knew he was suffering. They knew he was on probation and didn't want to get him in further trouble. They knew his mom was a drunk and didn't want to make his life harder by reporting him. In their minds, they were protecting him and didn't give much thought to "What if he's really not kidding?"
Of all we've learned about mass and school shootings, there are always signs. He had a bunch of them. For years. No one said a thing. We're lucky he didn't act on them. People are nuts. I honestly think that people who commented on his posts, clearly having read them, should be charged with failure to report.
I think you're right, Karasti. Other than child abuse cases, which we were legally required to report even with only suspicions, we had nutty parents who we never reported to authorities...with one exception.
When my children were young I was very sensitive to sad stories about children being harmed. The heartbreak of it was touched with fear for the general safety of my own kids. I suppose having innocent little ones in the house makes such stories even more heartbreaking somehow.
I cry more easily now than ever before in my life, about suffering, and beauty. So I don't think I've become hardened to continuous horrible events, though I've learned to expect them.
I think maybe the emotion I feel is not so surprising now.
@robot, I think you are right. When you have little kids in your house, that connection is just too close to home. It's too easy to have images flashing in your mind of that being your child. Or imagining yourself capable of doing something to hurt your child. That people get to a place they are capable of that is completely nausea inducing and it's almost impossible to believe it happens.
We had a case here a few weeks ago where a mom had left her 2 young kids (both under 4 I think) with their dad so she could leave the state to find work. She came home to her kids alone in a crib, emaciated. She called 911 and reported the father. So of course money came in for the poor mom who had just been working and it turns out that with the shape they were in, the kids could not eat at the hospital. They had to be nutritionally supported so not to shock their system. And the wonderful mom brought food in their room, ate it in front of them, and then waved the food in the kids' faces and taunted them about being unable to eat...it boggles the mind and pains the heart. That people cannot connect normally with a normal instinct to protect and care for children is just unfathomable. It happens so often, no doubt largely from their parents' inability to love and connect with them. Sad on so many levels.
It sounds like a deadly case of Munchausen by proxy syndrome. The mom usually fakes illnesses in the child, so she can get extra attention as a devoted caregiver. But in this case, she deliberately made the child sick, to get attention.
http://kidshealth.org/parent/general/sick/munchausen.html
Yeah, I think that's why it affected me too @robot and @karasti - I have a 5 year old daughter.
Having said that, we give her laxatives every day and meletonin every night (by products of her Aspergers). I am not entirely comfortable doing it but we found the alternative to be worse!
How could she commit such an horrendous act ? What's got into her ? I guess one could see this type of behaviour as a case of demonic possession...
Speaking of demonic possession . . .
It's only been in the last 75 years or so that 'mental illness' has been reframed as a biological ILLNESS, not a moral shortcoming of some sort.
I believe a similar reframing is happening with an even more subtle kind of 'mental illness', the character or personality disorders. They are not 'illnesses' insofar as they are a biological process (in the brain) that is diseased. Functional MRI now shows very different 'brain function' between normal folks and sociopaths, in that certain brain areas don't light up in sociopaths as they do in 'normals'.
Personality disorders aren't mental illnesses but they are disorders nonetheless, and rooted in brain activity.
They are difficult to identify because they are disorders of extremes -- normal human personality structure gone to extremes is the essence of these disorders. For instance, all of us have self-love (narcissism), a desire for belonging and attention, a human need to feel important (whether we are or not
), and powerful. Personality disorders are these normal human traits taken to severe extremes. This mother's pathological need for attention and 'praise' and sympathy is classic. Her need for attention is pathological in that it doesn't having a stopping point. Her need for attention and glory has no respect for the independent life of her own child. I reckon she barely noticed him as ANYTHING but a means for her to obtain a constant stream of attention and self-glorification.
Psychiatrists are reluctant to diagnose them and the public is clueless, in general, about them. Except lately we have books like "The Sociopath Next Door" and articles about "Is Your Lover a Narcissist?", so the general awareness is growing.
It's like as a society, we are are starting to draw lines on human behavior, past which a person's behavior is considered 'disordered' or pathological. And even though as a Buddhist we 'know' about the literal emptiness and all that stuff, the relative reality that we live in, with each other DOES need to be taken seriously.
The co-pilot for Germanwings and this 'mother' in the linked article have very similar and OBVIOUS personality disorders. They are much more self-centered than usual, to the point they are delusional. And people with these issues are everywhere, all around us, we all know someone that is extremely difficult to get along with, that has destructive relational patterns and has NO insight or awareness, instead they blame everyone else around them.
We tolerate them, chalk it up to 'oh, that's just how Uncle Hank is' until your children finally tell you he's been molesting them right beneath your nose.
One thing we don't want to do is admit there are 'bad' people, with bad intentions right in our faces in everyday life. We'd rather them be in the movies and horror fiction where they belong, but until folks get over their cherished fantasies about human nature, Uncle Hank and this 'mother' and the murderous co-pilot are going to maim and kill right beneath our noses. And the public will scratch their arses and heads for a while and go right back to tolerating grossly abnormal behavior by 'not seeing it' or not trusting their perceptions.
Eg you KNOW intuitively that your neighbour is molesting his/her daughter. You call the police but without proof... They are virtually powerless.
That is exactly right, and the saddest thing that it is right
.
But we have to start somewhere. We can't get from A to Z with things the way they are now, with people regularly tolerating and rewarding 'bad' behavior.
There probably isn't anything to be done once you have an Uncle Hank doin' his thing. So what causes an Uncle Hank in the first place? We are barely beginning to recognize that Uncle Hank is real and happening, and barely beginning to be capable of identifying what it is about him that makes him Uncle Hank.
Like with the Germanwings co-pilot. In a nutshell, there are folks who are up in arms about the negative publicity 'depression' and 'suicidality' are getting, and others that would like to demand all pilots who have the remotest mental health history be fired in case one afternoon they decide to act out their mental illness on a plane full of innocent people. And then of course, all the stuff about not being alone in the cockpit, and blah blah blah.
Hardly anyone (there are some) is focusing on the actual cause of this man's actions, and that's because hardly anyone has the language or concepts in their minds to differentiate out what IS pathological behavior and what it looks/acts/sounds/smells like. The average person has no clue because this awareness of human behavior is still part of the background noise. We barely know ourselves, so how in the world can effective action be taken when 99% of the human race lacks psychological sophistication to call a spade a spade? IOW, call a psychopath a psychopath, which is what this co-pilot was, beneath his uber-'everyman' exterior, and this 'mother'. Crack their heads open and it is UGLY in there, very disturbed and chaotic, very disordered.
I know I don't get to sounding quite this vehement and judgmental and 'oh so sure of myself' all that often, mainly because I'm not -- except for this matter, I feel about as sure of what I'm saying as I ever get.
The only real 'answer' is to prevent people like Lacey Spears from happening
And that co=pilot.
For centuries, people died of diabetes, but no one knew that's what they died from. Then in the 19th century diabetes was 'discovered' and in the early 20th, a treatment was discovered. Character pathology is like diabetes was when doctors had to taste human urine for sweetness to know what was killing their patients. They had no idea what to do about it. We have no idea what to do about it. Just ask any psychiatrist. No idea.
But before we can prevent it, we have to know what it is, and what is happening, and how it develops, and what it's effects are. And there will be a lot of resistance and all the usual horseshit that goes along with a paradigm shift. People are rigged to want to see themselves and each other in the best light possible. Character pathology (or personality disorders) are exactly the opposite of what we want/wish/hope to see in ourselves or each other.
That is one thing I repeatedly come back to when I'm considering issues we face, on a micro and macro level in society-we are horrible at looking to root causes and finding ways to deal with them. A lot of problems have root causes. Like in diabetes, obviously them finding the root cause was what lead to a viable solution. the same has to happen to solve ANY problem, but especially in the west that is one thing we are horrible at. We are reactionary and deal with symptoms by making the discomfort go away. But never dealing with the problems at hand.
One of my kids was watching 600 pound life on tv last night, and at the start there is a stat that says "only 5% will succeed" (referring to losing weight and keeping it off). He asked why so we had a good talk about the same thing. The extreme obesity is a symptom. When they do the surgery in an attempt to save their lives, it is a good thing, but it only helps deal with a symptom. When the issue that caused the symptoms isn't found and dealt with, the end up repeating the pattern of behaviors.
That's not to say we will find every answer all the time. But I think a lot of the time the bigger issues and root causes are known and we just don't know how to deal with them or there are no resources to do so so then we have no choice but to only deal with symptoms. It doesn't work very well most of the time.
@karasti, that's the core of the issue as far as I can understand it, and going for the 'root causes' doesn't MAKE money (god forbid it costs money) when it comes to problem solving human behavior. A person can't get to 600lbs without psychological and metabolic issues that no surgery or six weeks in a clinic can make a dent in.
I think there are plenty of people who 'know enough' about this or that root cause, but lack the empowerment to do much if anything at a group level.
At least we as individual practitioners can do our own 'root analysis'
in fact, that appears to be exactly what the Buddha did 2500 years ago.