It's called post-partum PSYCHOSIS for a reason -- the definition of psychosis is losing touch with reality manifested as auditory and visual hallucinations, delusional thoughts and beliefs and other disturbances in rational thought.
Yes, and yet the person is in touch with reality to the extent that they are capable of, for example, wanting to kill themselves and therefore jumping out of a second-story window, rather than maybe jumping off a sofa.
LC wasn't violent towards her husband, who would have been able to fend her off.
I think it's natural that people recognize there's some kind of rational, purposeful, intelligent aspect to this psychotic behaviour, especially as compared with what a person with dementia might do: wander around in a daze of confusion, truly out of touch with reality.
I don't think psychology has answered why, if someone is in a psychotic state, it sometimes results in so much targetted violence. It's not the case that psychosis is necessarily violent, very often it's not.
It seems in some ways, then, psychology is saying the psychotic person lost their normal impulse controls.
But many crimes are committed by people with impaired impulse control, due to drugs, alcohol
stress, etc. and yet they go to jail.
It just raises, in my mind, all sorts of questions about how some people are sent to jail for life and we applaud, and other people receive compassion.
JMO
