Andrea Yates

On June 20, 2001, a woman named Andrea Yates called her local police dispatch and requested the presence of officers to her home, refusing to give any specific reason for the request. When officers arrived, they found that Andrea had killed all five of her young children by drowning them in the family bathtub. In the spectacular trial that followed, America became fixated on Andrea’s religious motivations, her comprehension of the wrongfulness of her actions, and the issue of postpartum psychosis, a serious mental illness that can afflict 1 to 2 women out of every 1,000 who give birth. How do we understand the nature of insanity in the contemporary legal system? Is there a deeper meaning behind experiences that we would normally label as psychotic episodes? Can we start to expand our definition of psychosis so as to more compassionately treat people having these experiences?

Find more about Andrea Yates here

Read more about spiritual emergence and psychosis here, here, and here

Find Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis by Stanislov Grof here

Read Dr. Diana Raab’s article in Psychology Today here

Find out more about postpartum psychosis here

Learn more about the legal definitions of wrongfulness here