Roxetten
Full Member
That reminds me.
Good article in the Sindo yesterday.
Like all mothers, Deirdre Morley worried about her children. Her worries were of the character that are so common as to be mundane — immediately relatable to every parent in Ireland. She worried about how much screen time they were having, their diet, how they were adapting to school. When her first child was born, she worried about his development and his routine.
She worried, as all parents do at one time or another, whether her frailties, her imperfections as a human being, were causing her children damage.
A parent who is mentally well can entertain these worries briefly and then dismiss or compartmentalize them — shift focus to something else.
But Deirdre Morley was not mentally well and she was tormented by them. To such an extent they became her only reality; a catastrophic narrative that led her to believe that she had failed her children, that their lives and hopes of future happiness were irredeemably tainted. And that it was her fault.
Altruistic filicide, when a parent kills their child or children out of a belief that doing so is the only way to spare them suffering, is mercifully rare.
But the negative feelings, and the warped rationale that drives the impulse are not uncommon. Anyone who have ever had a run-in with clinical depression might recognise the disordered, black-and-white thinking behind Morley’s sense of worthlessness, her conviction that her life had become a wasteland, that there was no hope.
They’d recognise too, the longing for the relief of oblivion. Or as Morley eloquently put it in late 2019, “I just want to evaporate”.
Deirdre Morley wanted, desperately, to do her best for her children. She wanted to spare no effort on their behalf, even if that meant relieving them of the burden of being alive. To someone who is severely, suicidally depressed as she was, life is not a gift, it is a curse. Sentience itself is unbearable suffering.
She over-identified with her children. Her fate and theirs became one and the same. She came to believe that because of her own poor mental health, and its impact on her parenting, she had condemned them to suffer as she suffered. “They were broken like me because I couldn’t parent them, I couldn’t be resilient,” she told gardai after she was arrested. To seek relief herself through suicide would mean abandoning them to suffer alone. And in her warped logic, that was a dereliction of maternal duty that she couldn’t bear to countenance.
In the aftermath of the case, the functioning of mental health services in Ireland has been called into question. There will be a review into Deirdre Morley’s care and it is welcome. Not least for the sake of her bereaved husband Andrew McGinley, a man of superhuman dignity and courage in the face of unthinkable loss. He must live forever with the knowledge that earlier, more decisive intervention could have prevented the calamity that laid waste to his family. Deirdre Morley said so herself. Within a week of being prescribed anti-psychotics after she was taken into custody, she was lucid. She called it a “wonder drug” — “if only I had had this last week, things would have been different” she told her psychiatrist.
But parsing the details of this case and others like it for insights into prevention of filicide is delicate and difficult. The need to identify red flags needs to be balanced against the risk of stigmatising parents and driving them further into isolation, discouraging them from seeking help. Depression in mothers is common. Mothers who experience self-loathing and overwhelming anxiety and even passive suicidal ideation are ten a penny in our society. Mothers who are driven to kill as a result represent an infinitesimal fraction of them.
There’s not an awful lot of research or literature on altruistic filicide. Resources that examine preventative measures are scant, likely because samples are so small. But one review published in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law in 2005 counsels mental heath professionals that “depressed and suicidal parents should be directly questioned regarding the fate of their children in the event of their suicide. Appropriate treatment should be initiated and safety measures taken. The clinician should also determine whether any child is ‘over-loved,’ considered an extended part of the self, or the focus of paranoid delusions.”
This speaks directly to the particularities of the Morley case but seems to me to present more questions than it does answers. How do you identify a child who is ‘over-loved’? And in very early childhood, where dependence is absolute, young children do seem like an ‘extended part’ of the mother. From pregnancy on women come to understand in a primal way that their child’s survival depends on their survival. How do we distinguish a fusional parent/child relationship that is healthy and one that is pathological?
Above all, this unbearably sad case is a reminder of the brutally destructive power of mental illness and of the wide-reaching collateral damage it can cause. What happened to the children of Deirdre Morley is an isolated tragedy. But today in Ireland hundreds of thousands of families are suffering harm and trauma as a result of parental depression. If the legacy of Conor, Darragh and Carla is that more emphasis and resources are put against supporting those families, then that can only be for the good.
https://www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/brutally-destructive-power-of-mental-illnessbrought-home-in-morley-case-40457319.html
