Andrea Yates' lucid moments unfortunately her darkest
Isabel P. Ball
November 15, 2005
Andrea Yates is in the limelight again. Reportedly, she had expressed “surprised and unpleased” at the news that The Texas Lower Court of Appeals has recently reversed her conviction for her guilt of the crime, for which she was meted with life, to guilty due to insanity. Her lawyer though had wanted her to remain in confinement, where she is getting a continued, proper medical care. Prosecutors are appealing.
Poor, pitiful, unfortunate soul Andrea is so much in a life’s pit, she would not know how to get excited to the news, that to many other inmates would bring tremendous joy and hope to a possible reprieve, a second chance to life, freedom, and normalcy if it all comes to that. Nonetheless, it is my earnest hope that she gets well and be normal again.
Pitiable she was then, a lingering image of a defendant with sullen, spacy eyes sunken in dark circles, that her spectacles could not hide she is not much different either. In fact, she has lost 30 pounds, as she refuses to eat; she was taken to a hospital. Under the pall of more depression, speculations are attributing it to the divorce her husband Rusty Yates had filed and been processed.
If I may sound too affected, indeed, I am. That feel for the underdogs must have been a natural inclination for me, having manifested at some early life experiences. In our town, two unkempt, emaciated, and rattling itinerant locos (psychotic) roamed free, feared by us like bogeyman. A stigma, like the flagrant A word, opened them to attacks of willful, mischievous youths, who hounded them and calling inciting label “loco-loco” , at the same time, unmercifully hitting them with stones like some biblical condemned characters. Hurt and angry, these locos gave a menacing chase, and the pale-faced children scampered to safety, lest suffer an unpredictable fury of these pitiful, deranged souls.
Described as restive and dangerous, these locos are known to have daily logged untold distance, ever responsive to uncontrollable urgings from a restless, sick mind. Fortunately, their families remain vigilant and responsible for their whereabouts, in an island where everybody knows just about everybody. As a young mind, I had felt so much sadness and compassion for them while contemptuous to life’s seeming unfair schemes evident among the insane I viewed as living dead.
That emotion I had felt strongly for Andrea Yates, as well. Intimate with her case, her committed crime, no doubt, is heinous to any normal mind standard. But knowing her background of mental illness, she is a sorry picture of humanity begging for help, and seeking out for sanity her unsound mind disallowed her, biologically. Meanwhile, in the course of the discussions of her case, something seemed to have established, a beautiful argument that I have gleaned, so touching and inspiring, urging me to expound here. It is a lame defense for Andrea Yates.
According to her confession to the Police, Andrea had killed her children as direct order from God to save them from eternal damnation. A mind in aberration, she often said that she heard voices satanic in nature. Even in her sick mind, Andrea, was scared as a child of the voices and the prods to her to do bad things to others, a blatant order to kill, or to kill her self. She heard it first time after the birth of her first child, Noah, and subsequently, with two other births. Psychiatrists have termed it post partum depression or simply an attack of severe depression resulting from childbirth. Few other incidences of an onset of derangement have happened when her own husband, Rusty Yates, claimed to have wrestled with her to take the knife away from her throat, an evident attempt of suicide. In and out, Andrea lodged in hospitals and clinics, prescribed of various medications, by different doctors. Then, when assigned to a primary psychiatrist doctor, Andrea’s mental condition continued to swing wildly, and the doctor finally issued a caveat that the couple must not have babies anymore. We know that didn’t happen, and that brought Andrea’s delusional and destructive fate.
Philosophically, I could argue that Andrea, when she decided to kill her children to protect them from Satan, she was seeing a glimpse of reason, clarity, moment of normalcy, if only fleetingly and confusedly. Arguably, that could come from the fact, that as a nurse, she was imbued with knowledge about the role of heredity in an individual. Euphemistically, her beautiful mind might have the lucidity to have pondered on the situation. Aware that she is carrying a seed of insanity that she privately have bouts with so much frequency, then a negative thought registering that she might have passed it on to her children through the rule of heredity. Report supports the fact that in Andrea’s family, her father, (deceased), brother and sister were all sufferers of depression. Interpretively, the fatal act was consistent with her confession that she had had a realization that she was a bad mother, (referring perhaps to her insane mind). She continued to be concerned about her children growing up “disabled,” and then obsessively worrying about them not normally developing. Poignant, it was a mind of a typical mother loving, sacrificial to the end, and her willingness to commit an act of mercy killing.
Hold on! I’m not espousing such kind of killing to become a normal, condonable act. Far from it, and should never be, regardless of the circumstances. But simply, I’m trying to put myself into Andrea’s shoes, or conjecturing what might she be doing and thinking about on a particular moment to the next, as a person with a mind totally going haywire. It would be so much awesome and educational to have to encroach into her mind, even imaginatively, and witness her private fights to control her own demons that are so rabid and heinously dictating. The fact that she feels scared of the demon, establishes her sanity as being alive, though defeated without the prop of medication. What about her personal battle to maintain her sanity, avoid the satanic drift, as she clings to the twilight and flickering sense of sanity when it swings wildly, like a pendulum of death? It sure felt like an exploding mind to me. And that was exactly happened to her.
As individuals, sometime or another, we have had experiences of being afraid, and a good understanding of the modern-day affliction called stress. Fear and stress are simple and common bodily reactions to external stimuli impacting our normal selves. When we are afraid, our bodily system react manifesting in hasten pulse, breathing shallow and fast, heart pumping wildly, mind overactive, we sweat, and so on, and so forth. Similarly, under stress, similar sensation overcomes us, and the mind is palpably uneasy, and is the very reason why we become restless and having insomnia. Compound these feelings three or more times, and our minds would be racing like Andrea Yates’, totally delusional.
Could her knowledge of heredity played a big part in Andrea Yates thought processes in the killing of her children? Clearly, there was a pure motherly act of mercy, a shining and lucid moment, of a mind gripped by fears and confusion. No matter how relieving, benevolent, liberating the motives might be, humanity has a devaluing equivalent to it, imprisonment or death. Andrea is spared of immediate death, but like the locos in my town, she is a living dead.
Andrea, an unfortunate soul continues to battle life’s torment. So, she continues to drift away between sanity with so much unsoundness, depicted in her mother’s quoted statement. "It was heartbreaking," Kennedy said. "She asked me who was taking care of the children?”
Poor, pitiful, unfortunate soul Andrea is so much in a life’s pit, she would not know how to get excited to the news, that to many other inmates would bring tremendous joy and hope to a possible reprieve, a second chance to life, freedom, and normalcy if it all comes to that. Nonetheless, it is my earnest hope that she gets well and be normal again.
Pitiable she was then, a lingering image of a defendant with sullen, spacy eyes sunken in dark circles, that her spectacles could not hide she is not much different either. In fact, she has lost 30 pounds, as she refuses to eat; she was taken to a hospital. Under the pall of more depression, speculations are attributing it to the divorce her husband Rusty Yates had filed and been processed.
If I may sound too affected, indeed, I am. That feel for the underdogs must have been a natural inclination for me, having manifested at some early life experiences. In our town, two unkempt, emaciated, and rattling itinerant locos (psychotic) roamed free, feared by us like bogeyman. A stigma, like the flagrant A word, opened them to attacks of willful, mischievous youths, who hounded them and calling inciting label “loco-loco” , at the same time, unmercifully hitting them with stones like some biblical condemned characters. Hurt and angry, these locos gave a menacing chase, and the pale-faced children scampered to safety, lest suffer an unpredictable fury of these pitiful, deranged souls.
Described as restive and dangerous, these locos are known to have daily logged untold distance, ever responsive to uncontrollable urgings from a restless, sick mind. Fortunately, their families remain vigilant and responsible for their whereabouts, in an island where everybody knows just about everybody. As a young mind, I had felt so much sadness and compassion for them while contemptuous to life’s seeming unfair schemes evident among the insane I viewed as living dead.
That emotion I had felt strongly for Andrea Yates, as well. Intimate with her case, her committed crime, no doubt, is heinous to any normal mind standard. But knowing her background of mental illness, she is a sorry picture of humanity begging for help, and seeking out for sanity her unsound mind disallowed her, biologically. Meanwhile, in the course of the discussions of her case, something seemed to have established, a beautiful argument that I have gleaned, so touching and inspiring, urging me to expound here. It is a lame defense for Andrea Yates.
According to her confession to the Police, Andrea had killed her children as direct order from God to save them from eternal damnation. A mind in aberration, she often said that she heard voices satanic in nature. Even in her sick mind, Andrea, was scared as a child of the voices and the prods to her to do bad things to others, a blatant order to kill, or to kill her self. She heard it first time after the birth of her first child, Noah, and subsequently, with two other births. Psychiatrists have termed it post partum depression or simply an attack of severe depression resulting from childbirth. Few other incidences of an onset of derangement have happened when her own husband, Rusty Yates, claimed to have wrestled with her to take the knife away from her throat, an evident attempt of suicide. In and out, Andrea lodged in hospitals and clinics, prescribed of various medications, by different doctors. Then, when assigned to a primary psychiatrist doctor, Andrea’s mental condition continued to swing wildly, and the doctor finally issued a caveat that the couple must not have babies anymore. We know that didn’t happen, and that brought Andrea’s delusional and destructive fate.
Philosophically, I could argue that Andrea, when she decided to kill her children to protect them from Satan, she was seeing a glimpse of reason, clarity, moment of normalcy, if only fleetingly and confusedly. Arguably, that could come from the fact, that as a nurse, she was imbued with knowledge about the role of heredity in an individual. Euphemistically, her beautiful mind might have the lucidity to have pondered on the situation. Aware that she is carrying a seed of insanity that she privately have bouts with so much frequency, then a negative thought registering that she might have passed it on to her children through the rule of heredity. Report supports the fact that in Andrea’s family, her father, (deceased), brother and sister were all sufferers of depression. Interpretively, the fatal act was consistent with her confession that she had had a realization that she was a bad mother, (referring perhaps to her insane mind). She continued to be concerned about her children growing up “disabled,” and then obsessively worrying about them not normally developing. Poignant, it was a mind of a typical mother loving, sacrificial to the end, and her willingness to commit an act of mercy killing.
Hold on! I’m not espousing such kind of killing to become a normal, condonable act. Far from it, and should never be, regardless of the circumstances. But simply, I’m trying to put myself into Andrea’s shoes, or conjecturing what might she be doing and thinking about on a particular moment to the next, as a person with a mind totally going haywire. It would be so much awesome and educational to have to encroach into her mind, even imaginatively, and witness her private fights to control her own demons that are so rabid and heinously dictating. The fact that she feels scared of the demon, establishes her sanity as being alive, though defeated without the prop of medication. What about her personal battle to maintain her sanity, avoid the satanic drift, as she clings to the twilight and flickering sense of sanity when it swings wildly, like a pendulum of death? It sure felt like an exploding mind to me. And that was exactly happened to her.
As individuals, sometime or another, we have had experiences of being afraid, and a good understanding of the modern-day affliction called stress. Fear and stress are simple and common bodily reactions to external stimuli impacting our normal selves. When we are afraid, our bodily system react manifesting in hasten pulse, breathing shallow and fast, heart pumping wildly, mind overactive, we sweat, and so on, and so forth. Similarly, under stress, similar sensation overcomes us, and the mind is palpably uneasy, and is the very reason why we become restless and having insomnia. Compound these feelings three or more times, and our minds would be racing like Andrea Yates’, totally delusional.
Could her knowledge of heredity played a big part in Andrea Yates thought processes in the killing of her children? Clearly, there was a pure motherly act of mercy, a shining and lucid moment, of a mind gripped by fears and confusion. No matter how relieving, benevolent, liberating the motives might be, humanity has a devaluing equivalent to it, imprisonment or death. Andrea is spared of immediate death, but like the locos in my town, she is a living dead.
Andrea, an unfortunate soul continues to battle life’s torment. So, she continues to drift away between sanity with so much unsoundness, depicted in her mother’s quoted statement. "It was heartbreaking," Kennedy said. "She asked me who was taking care of the children?”
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