bookbakery said:
I disagree with the idea that Andrea Yates is the Poster Child for what is wrong with Mental Health today. She is an unfortunate person who did NOT get the help she needed due to her family and friends failing her. Drugs play a very important part in improving the mental health of patients, just like drugs for diabetes, substance abuse, and high blood pressure. The consequences for not taking medication is death... including the deaths of innocents.
Andrea Yates clearly showed many signs of needing help. Her suicide attempt (was it just one... I don't know) was a Huge call for help. Why didn't her family respond? Was it their religion? Was it denial? Was it ignorance? I don't know. Why didn't Rusty put aside his desire for alot of children in favor of the health and safety of his wife and current children, when the doctor told them not to have more children?
If Rusty is the sane and healthy part of this marriage, he grossly failed in protecting and helping his wife. His failure and his faults do not extend to his wife. She is a separate being who deserved a lot better.
Bookbakery, I actually could not agree with you more. It infuriates me that the burden of seeking help falls upon the mentally ill. We do not expect cancer patients to drive themselves to appointments, etc, but we still seem to not grasp that the mentally ill lack the ability to oversee their own care. How can they? It's absurd.
Andrea tried on at least two occasions to kill herself. After the second is when the doctors warned her and Rusty that more children would result in more psychosis. After this Mary, the baby at the time of the killings, was born.
To be fair, I think Rusty viewd Andrea's condition as something like diabetes or high blood pressure. Take the medicine and poof, you're okay. The reality that there is not necessarily a quick fix and it might have meant giving up more children for his wife's health seems to have eluded him. He was told that part of her care included counseling, but that seems to have been put on the back burner. I believe part of Andrea's illness stemmed from a deep depression over dealing with imperfection--she was a high-achieving individual and her husband was of the same mentality. She began to see her children's normal behavior as signs of her own failure as a mother, because she had taken on (and this is where the homeschooling was an issue) complete responsibility for every aspect of their lives, including planning and implementing their education. Without competent therapy, there's no way she could have come to terms with those feelings and unrealistic expectations.
Andrea had a doctor's appointment two days before the children died. She had been taken off Haldol about two weeks before. If she wasn't responding to the Haldol, it's hard to understand why she wasn't hospitalized again. She was clearly not doing better, at the very least.
That is what I mean by Andrea being the poster child. She did have a nursing colleague friend who recognized how sick she was, and visited Rusty pleading with him to try and do more to get Andrea hospitalized,etc, shortly before the deaths as well.
It infuriates me that Andrea told the doctors after Noah (first child) that she had visions of stabbing someone, that she tried to kill herself twice, and yet nobody thought she had any violent tendencies. Apparently, killing yourself does not count as violence. WHY?
There were other "overload" factors in Andrea's life as well as the "live on a schoolbus with four kids" attempt. At one point, she was nurse for her elderly father (I believe he had Alzheimer's, although I couldn't reference that. She did try to overdose with his Parkinson's meds.) This with three little children? And a history of post-partum?
That's why I think Andrea is the poster child. The system failed her, (she seems to have had the "insurance has run out, so you're cured" diagnosis in regards to her hospital stay.) her family--especially Rusty Yates--failed her.
Andrea can never be released because she was convicted and not acquitted on grounds of insanity. (as Dee Parnham, who beat her children with rocks, was, this spring.) If she had been acquitted on insanity defense, she could be released when the facility and doctors decided she was cured--which would have meant going right back to Rusty "she wouldn't take her meds" Yates.
