The Return of Andrea Yates

Posted on November 10, 2005 in Justice Stigma

Gather any group of mood disorder sufferers together and raise the subject of Andrea Yates and you will hear many sighs. “That poor woman,” they say to one another. “Now that she is on medications, she must be in hell. How can anyone live with what she did?”

We accept that she must be segregated from the general public, but the Texas jury which convicted her received a piece of erroneous information from a famous television psychiatrist.

California psychiatrist, Park Dietz, was a key witness for prosecutors. He testified he was a consultant for the TV show Law & Order and that just before Yates drowned her children she watched an episode of a similar incident where the mother was found innocent by reason of insanity.

After the conviction but before the sentencing it was found there was no episode like that.

The 1st Texas Court of Appeals ruled in January that District Judge Belinda Hill should have called a mistrial.

The point of misinformation like that dribbled from the mouth of Dietz is simply deny the reality of mental illness and the effects it can have on the mind. I have no doubt that Yates was conscious of what she was doing,. The overstressed and mood-blurred mind begins to concoct ideas using what we all can see and hear that make no sense to the stable person. Most people don’t get that mental illness isn’t entirely about seeing things: it’s about warped reasoning, too. And Yates, under the pressure of her Fundamentalist husband to have too many babies in too short a period of time, started to analyze her environment in a way that wasn’t sane at all. She could name each of the children she slaughtered. Yet she took them in her hands and shoved their heads beneath the water of her bathtub.

Only her mood-cluttered mind of the time can fathom why. It makes no sense because it makes sense inside a psychosis.

Prosecutors argue to kill. This explains why there was an appeal beyond last January’s appeal. Those who put Yates on trial in the first place know that without Dietz’s slur, they might have a different result. Sympathy for Yates across the nation is strong. Finding a pool of impartial jurors will be tough. More importantly, they will not be able to argue that she got the idea from outside. They have to make Yates into a clear-headed schemer which she was not.

Did Yates know right from wrong? Even though she was clearly psychotic, this may be the trail through the forest for Texas prosecutors. Nevertheless, Dietz should be grilled on the stand. Where did he get this notion that there had been about a mother drowning her kids in the bathroom and then getting off on an insanity defense the week before Yates’s crime? The New York Times reports that Dr. Dietz says he made “an honest mistake”. Defense attornies should be ready to pounce on this. What other mistakes has the Hollywood psychiatrist made in the course of his testimony? How has his role as a consultant to a popular crime series colored his views on depression and bipolar illness?

No one doubts that Andrea Yates did it. Mood disorder sufferers seldom black out so it is hard for us to convey the death grip of the illness on our minds. Every last one of us feels Andrea Yates needs help. As society incarcerates more and more of our brothers and sisters in the disease instead of treating them, we worry: will I be next?

We have to stand by Andrea because she is one of us.

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Mental illness issues receive little attention from my fellow progressive bloggers. Right now, it is too convenient to use brain disorders as a way of discrediting Bush and others. I wouldn’t call it a prejudice, but a willful negligence. Our disease has become a political tool. We just want to feel well and unstigmatized.