2001-06-27 - 6:02 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: Bananarama's "Cruel Summer"

Quick update, 7/1 12:01am or so: I'm on vacation. I'll be back next Saturday. I'm going to try to keep a paper diary of sorts so that I can remember stuff, because I'm gonna be trapped on a boat for five days. Happily we'll be docked for part of it, so I can get out and walk around, but it still makes me a tad claustrophobic. Maybe I'll get used to it! We'll find out. Have a happy Fourth, y'all.

In reaction to yesterday's entry, I got a very interesting e-mail from Tino of Tinotopia entitled "Murder and Insanity". Originally I had it posted here, but he has a much prettier version, with added commentary, at his website now. It is great. Go read it. Now.

Also, here are Tino's comments on the definition of insanity that I was struggling over yesterday:

Are the actions of a crazy person crazy? Or is the only crazy thing the base assumption that leads him down a different path of reality from the rest of us?

And what about an action of a crazy person that is in fact perfectly rational, given that he's in a situation that is purely a result of his insanity (i.e. Gulf War)?

I've heard insanity defined as performing the same actions over and over and expecting a different result. That could probably be reversed to cover performing the same actions, getting a different result, and ignoring that fact (i.e. not recognizing when the circumstances have changed).

In a subsequent e-mail, we got to talking about Susan Smith.

On the Gnomeboard, among other places, people seem to be reluctant to place Andrea Yates in the same category as Susan Smith. They see Susan Smith as a cold-blooded, calculating killer, and Andrea Yates as a victim of horrible circumstance.

My feeling is, if you're going to say Andrea Yates was a victim of circumstance (and my currently theory is that the circumstance is a biological propensity for insanity triggered by biological and environmental circumstances) then so was Susan Smith.

Here's the exchange between me and Tino about that. Quotes with ":" preceding them are mine; plain text is his. My quotes, btw, were part of a single paragraph in my original e-mail and should probably be read as such first.

---

: Hm ... what about a case like Susan Smith, where her assumption is
: logical in her narrow context (if I want this man, I'm better off
: getting rid of my kids)

I don't think that the argument can be made that killing your kids is ever sane. Why does she want to be with that man? Biologically, because she likes the look of his genes. So in order to have his kids, she'll kill these kids that she's already got? Particularly considering the relatively large risk and investment that women have in reproduction (compared to men), that doesn't seem to make sense.

: and her actions were rational (if I don't want
: to get caught, I better make people think somebody else did this).

Once she's in the soup, it's rational for her to want to get out of it. Look at it this way: is it crazy to not want to go to jail? Of course not.

: Susan's problem is that she didn't look outside that narrow context to
: the obvious question of, "Maybe this man is not worth it" or the
: alternative "I could just give these kids up for adoption".

Well, yes.

: Maybe that goes back to your self-preservation issue. Susan Smith's
: drive to preserve her own existence (however narrow-minded she may have
: been in examining her options) was stronger than her drive to preserve
: her kids' existence?

Susan Smith's drive to have children with man #2 was stronger than her drive to preserve the genetic inheritance her kids represented.

Maybe she had no money and couldn't take care of the kids, and so viewed starting over as the best strategy. Or she might simply have been insane, and making absurd decisions that don't make any sense. I tend to think that this is the most likely.

: Maybe my false assumption is that humans are anything more than slaves
: to their biological drives, although I really don't want to believe that.

There's a lot more to people than biological drives, but there are just a few universal drives that we all share. It's simpler to reduce humans to the level of animals and look for motives in that context; going beyond that is just too complicated. I think that this works when you're talking about very basic things like life and death and sex and food and such, but it's not useful for anything more subtle.

Tino

Maybe the only real difference between Susan Smith and Andrea Yates, if they were both insane, is that there are far more people who can grasp Andrea's thought processes than people who can grasp Susan's. Maybe at one time Susan Smith was a nice woman, too, and something went horribly wrong.

Which leads me to an idea some people seem to be expressing, including a column in Newsweek that I cannot locate anymore. The idea is this: because they personally have experienced horrifying fleeting thoughts, or even extended periods of such thoughts (in some cases, because of post partum depression), that what Andrea Yates did is somehow understandable. "There, but for the grace of God, go I", is what they seem to think. I'm not sure that this is true.

If it were true, it implies that postpartum psychosis, or murdering your children for that matter, is the rock bottom of a slippery slope starting with baby blues and ordinary PPD. Is where you end up on the slope a function of how bad your environment is? So that, under the right circumstances, any of us could do what she did?

If so, where does your free will come in, where you say, "Okay, these thoughts I am having are not normal for me, and they are not normal for society, so something is wrong here and I had better do something about it"? Even if "doing something" means walking out the door before you hurt your baby? That, in my opinion, is a very caring, rational act under frightening circumstances. If Andrea Yates had any rational thought left (and doubt that she did), this would have been a good action for her to take.

Also, if these women feel that they have something in common with Andrea Yates, then doesn't that mean anyone who had a fleeting thought about using a gun to kill someone annoying is just as bad as a murderer who actually does it?

Despite what the Catholic church may say, I don't believe that the thought is as bad as the act. There is a world of difference between those things. It must be horrifying to have the feeling that you want to dump your kid in the river, but having the sanity not to act upon it means there is a yawning chasm between you and Andrea Yates. Not to mention there have been literally thousands of women who have raised large families of rambunctious kids and managed not to kill them.

I'm more inclined to see postpartum psychosis as being what happens when an already-insane person, or a person with faulty brain wiring, gets PPD. Or as Poindexter put it, "Sometimes crazy people have children!" It's one more reason why it makes me crazy (heh) that irresponsible journalists and lawyers are throwing the term "postpartum depression" around as thought it is the "reason" for the murders. As though anyone with PPD could be the next Andrea Yates. That's really just wrong.

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