Commentary: Defending Andrea Yates

WASHINGTON, March 18 (UPI) -- The verdict is in and Andrea Yates has been found guilty of killing her children. But her husband Russell and the mental health system that failed her should also be found equally culpable.

There is no disputing the fact that Yates tragically took the lives of her young five, but the question that will always be looming around this case will be who in her family and the medical community were aware of how sick she really was and why didn't they do something?

Yates, 37, is the Houston, Texas, mother, who drowned her five children -- Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 2, Luke, 3 and 6-month-old Mary -- in a bathtub. Yates then called her husband Russell at work and told him he needed to come home. When he arrived, he found the police who told him his children were dead.

The prevailing argument supporting Yates' conviction and subsequent life sentence maintains she knew what she was doing when she dragged her children into the bathroom and plunged their heads underwater, holding them there until they were dead.

Diehard proponents of Texas-style justice that supports the double-barreled eye-for-eye doctrine fails to look beyond their myopic view to see that her husband and mental health system failed her miserably.

What the jurors who convicted Yates most likely reacted to were the chilling details of what transpired that morning. Yates admitted to authorities that she drowned each of the children in the bathtub, describing to authorities in horrific detail the scene in which her oldest child, Noah, age 7, came into the bathroom and saw her drowning his 6-month-old sister Mary. The boy apparently tried to escape but Yates told police she dragged him back into the bathroom and drowned him too.

Was Yates guilty of killing her children? Yes. Was she responsible for what she did? Absolutely not. Locking Andrea Yates away for the rest of her life makes the vain attempt at concealing our nation's dirty little secret: Mental health care is no better today for women, than it was in the 1950s.

What Yates' critics fail to realize is that people with biological brain disorders are literally at the mercy of their own brain chemistry. Research has revealed quite vividly that a brain deficient in certain neurological chemicals does not act or react as a normal brain would. Unfortunately the law and the science of mental disease have yet to catch up with one another. That makes the argument for vigilant monitoring of seriously ill patients by mental health professionals that much more important. A mistake, as we have seen, can result in devastating consequences.

One day after his wife was arrested, Russell Yates told reporters his wife suffered from postpartum depression and that she had previously attempted suicide after the birth of their fourth son in 1999. It was her fourth attempt at killing herself.

The birth of their baby daughter in January and the death of Andrea Yates' father from Alzheimer's disease two months later in March should have spurred Russell Yates to more aggressively seek help for his wife, given her psychiatric history.

Her doctors should have insisted on some type of protective setting for her and the children until the worst of her depression had passed. Russell Yates told reporters after the killings that his wife had become "withdrawn" and "robotic" in the weeks leading up to the tragedy. Leaving her alone to cope with the demons that come with depression, the death of a loved one and the loneliness that comes with the seclusion of motherhood was a recipe for disaster.

With Yates' apparent history of mental difficulties, erratic behavior and medication therapy, certainly someone should have been able to diagnosis or identify her potential for spiraling out of control.

Postpartum depression affects almost 10 percent of new mothers. A syndrome in its mildest form that includes crying spells, emotional swings, and feelings of inadequacy, in its most severe presentation can develop into full-blown psychosis. It can start weeks after delivery and last for a year or more. For women with more than one child, it can last for years, as it did in Yates' case.

In its extreme form -- psychosis -- it can cause these women to suffer delusions or hallucinations. The risks of women suffering from postpartum psychosis killing their children or committing suicide are great, even though the overall numbers of mothers actually suffering from the extreme form of the ailment is extremely low, about 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent overall, according to experts in maternity and childbirth.

Reports have emerged that Yates was treated in a psychiatric facility after attempting suicide in June 1999. Hospital employees contacted child protective services out of concern for her children. But the question remains: Why was there no follow up by authorities? Often people who suffer from these types of biological brain disorders do not have the self-awareness to seek treatment on their own. Such appeared to be the case with Yates.

The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, a grassroots advocacy organization, points to a U.S. Department of Justice Report in 1999 which revealed that 16 percent of all inmates in state and federal jails and prisons have schizophrenia, manic depressive illness, major depression and other forms of severe mental illness. According to that report, that meant that on any given day, there were roughly 283,000 persons incarcerated with severe mental illnesses. In contrast, there are approximately 70,000 persons with severe mental illnesses in public psychiatric hospitals, and 30 percent of them are forensic patients. Those numbers alone prove a critical lack of adequate mental health services in this country.

The Yates incident is a glowering example of gender politics. The expectation that a woman would stay home and nurture the children remains strong in this country. As a result, the quality of her medical care was severely compromised. Had Yates been a man sent home with inadequate instructions after a cardiac by-pass operation resulting in death, certainly the physicians would have been hauled before an ethics board. But Andrea Yates was a young mother, who had child after child without her physicians or husband giving any thought to her physical, mental or emotional well-being.

No one disputes that one week before Yates killed the children, her physician discontinued the medication Haldol, a powerful anti-psychotic medication. She was discharged prematurely from psychiatric care and left without any type of after-care to ensure that she had the support systems in place to cope with her life at home.

Russell Yates believed that living in a bus was an adequate life for his family and that allowing his wife to home-school their children was the right path. His assertions that she only had to take her medication and feed herself, that all other responsibilities were taken away from her was soundly debunked by her family.

"Myself and others had actually almost begged and tried to educate him on the help that she needed and also to loosen up and lighten the load that she was under, but instead it seemed like it just kept increasing, increasing and increasing," Brian Kennedy, her brother told ABC News on Monday. Kennedy, said authorities should look into the possibility of charging Russell Yates, but he wasn't specific about what those charges should be. Likewise on Saturday, prosecutor Joseph Owmby, said he had not completely ruled out charging Yates' husband.

Charging and prosecuting Yates made no more sense than charging and prosecuting an Alzheimer's patient who cannot remember the face of a family member and kills that person believing an intruder has entered their home. That patient may know killing is wrong, but was acting out of what their diseased brain believed was self-defense.

So what happens now, no one is quite sure. But despite our country's penchant for turning a blind-eye to things that are difficult, some solutions do exist.

First, just as President George W. Bush has overhauled the nation's education system, his administration needs to revamp the mental health system to focus on access and quality of care. Second, laws should be rewritten to hold accountable spouses and close family members when they do not seek out treatment for persons with severe mental illnesses. And third, those laws should also hold the medical and mental health community to a higher standard of accountability in the treatment of severe mental illness.

Andrea Yates has been condemned to live at minimum her next 40 years in prison. And the debate over whether she should have been charged or prosecuted will be debated for years, much like the O.J. Simpson trial. Still, what is crystal clear is the one person not completely responsible for this tragedy is Andrea Yates.