Andrea Yates | Homicide or Legal Insanity? | Mental Health & Personality

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel hello this is dr. grande today's question asks oh I can analyze the mental health and personality factors that may be at work in the Andrea Yates case other questions here would be what are religious delusions and how they fit into psychosis can I analyze the controversial testimony of dr. Park dates in this case and specifically the false testimony that may have led to Yates conviction just remind him not diagnosing anybody in this video only speculating about what could be happening in a situation like this so here I'll take a look at the background of Andrea Yates and the timeline of the crimes and then look at the mental health and personality factors so starting with the background and timeline Andrea Yates was born on July 2 1964 and Hallsville Texas she was the youngest of five children as a teenager she exhibited symptoms of depression but she did relatively well in school in high school for example she was in the Honor Society she was the class valedictorian and she was the captain of the swim team she graduated high school in 1982 and entered a nursing program she would later work as a registered nurse for eight years she married rusty Yates on April 17 1993 they had been dating for four years they were both 28 years old at the time they were married Yates stopped working shortly after that and they lived in Friendswood Texas for a while then we see they have this trailer they live in Florida then they buy a bus and live in that and eventually buy a house in Houston Texas so we see interesting living arrangements with this particular couple Yates would eventually have five children she had Noah in 1994 John and 95 Paul in 1997 Luke in 1999 and Mary in the year 2000 she also miscarried once in 1996 after her first child was born she had an elucidation where she envisioned she was using a knife to harm somebody June 17 1999 we see that Yates attempts to and her own life by overdosing on a medication called trazodone this resulted in her first hospitalization she was diagnosed at this time with major depressive disorder single episode severe now because of the limitations of her medical insurance she was still symptomatic when she was released she also discontinued taking the medication after her discharge from the hospital evidently she started to engage in self-harming behaviors like scratching bald patches on her scalp picking sores and scraping the skin on her arms and legs moving now to June 20 1999 we see that Yates attempts to end her life for a second time the next day July 21 we see she's hospitalized again he or she is diagnosed with major depressive disorder severe recurrent with psychotic features we also see a rule-out diagnosis this was schizophrenia catatonic type so this means that whoever diagnosed her believe she had major depressive disorder but they weren't quite sure that it wasn't schizophrenia that's what the rule-out is used for so somebody treating her would look at that and know they had to rule out that other disorder if they wanted to gain some level of accuracy with the diagnosis August 18 1999 a psychiatrist named dr. star branch warns Yates that giving birth again would likely lead to a psychotic depressive episode January 20 2008 says what would be her last visit with dr. star branch Yates admits at that time she was not taking her medication November 30 2008 see gives birth to her daughter Mary then we go to March 12 2001 Yates father dies after this we see she starts pulling out her own hair she stops talking she believed that there were spy cameras around the house watching her and she believed television characters were telling her that she was a bad mother Yates is hospitalized for a third time on March 31 2001 on April 1st Yates has her first appointment with dr. Mohammad Sayeed he notes that she is almost catatonic may 3 2015 with water later she would admit that she had planned on committing the murders on that day the next day May 4 we see her fourth hospitalization she's diagnosed with major depressive disorder recurrent severe postpartum June 18 2011 ten use antipsychotics and adjusts the levels of antidepressants allegedly he told her to think positive thoughts so kind of a dismissive comment there that has no basis in science moving now to June 20 2001 Andrea Yates causes the death of all five of her children by drowning them in her bathtub she killed them one by one posing their bodies on a bed after they died the last one she killed was Noah and she left him in the bathtub she calls the police and then her husband after the police arrived Yates admitted she killed her children August 9 2001 the state of Texas seeks the death bounty it may seem a bit surprising but Harris County Texas is known for executing prisoners if this county were a state it would only be behind Texas and Virginia in the number of executions since 1977 September 22 2001 she is found mentally competent to stand trial during the trial both the prosecution and the defense agree that Yates was mentally ill the question really came down to whether she was sane or insane March 15 2002 she's found guilty of two counts of capital murder the jury deliberated less than four hours three days later she sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 40 years the jury only deliberated five minutes for this decision moving to January 6 2005 on appeal Yates conviction is reversed so what happened here is a mental health professional from California named dr. Park Dietz had originally testified that there was an episode of the television show law and order that featured a crime remarkably similar to what happened with the ACE and the character in the show was acquitted for murder by reason of sanity after he hates original trial law & order' criminal intent did Aaron episode that was partially based on her case but no episode like that had aired previously it simply did not exist so he testified to something that was 100% false January 9 2006 Yates is facing another trial she enters a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity the same plea she had entered for the first trial July 26 2006 after deliberating for three days the jury finds Yates not guilty by reason of insanity she was committed to a secure mental health facility moving now to the mental health and personality factors so Andrea and rusty Yates had unconventional religious beliefs which became an area of focus during the trial they were not members of any particular Church in that area instead they hosted Bible study groups in their home three nights a week at the time they were married the couple announced that they wanted to have as many kids as possible rusty may have applied a lot of pressure to Andrea to continue having children rusty believed in the teachings of a fundamentalist preacher named Michael Warren Jackie this preacher believed that the forces of evil were always intensely threatening believers he believed that parents were fully responsible for ensuring the salvation of their children further proclaiming that parents would be better off ending their own lives than causing their children to burn in the fires of hell now we see in the world of mental health that it's not unusual for fears to transfer into hallucinations and delusions anything that contains an element of danger can do this like aliens government ages insects disease again almost anything dangerous can be converted and become part of the psychotic content religious beliefs that involve an element of danger can be transferred as well and this is relatively common it seems as though this is what happened with Andrea Yates we see a good example in looking at the motive she offered for the murders she said that her children were stumbling disrespectful and would not obey therefore they were destined to go to hell she also said they were marked by Satan therefore the only way to save them was to kill them she believed that when the state punished her for committing murder Satan would be destroyed in that process she continued to have loose nations in jail she said she saw satanic teddy bears and ducks although no teddy bear collection is complete without the Satanic teddy bear it is quite understandable why many people exclude this one from their collection it's interesting in my career I've actually seen a number of instances where people believe that teddy bears specifically have supernatural powers and the ability to commit relatively complex crimes like the ability to design weapons and pick locks kind of like MacGyver teddy bear often people with these beliefs are afraid to give the teddy bears away or lock them in a closet or whatever it's like they're afraid to disrespect the teddy bears to anger them even more which I guess makes sense because with their advanced technical skills the teddy bears could escape from a closet or some other locked container it might be better for some people not to buy these teddy bears in the first place so just say no to Satanic teddy bears so back to the religious delusions here we see the content of Yates experiences manifested in her delusion so much so that she believes she was doing something necessary when she committed murder so she had a conceptualization of right and wrong but she kind of flipped them around she was doing something wrong believing it was right to answer this question about the controversial testimony of dr. Park Dietz this behavior really hurt the image of mental health professionals who function as expert witnesses there were a few things troubling about his testimony Dietz had a reputation of testifying as an expert witness for the prosecution and he had been involved in an extraordinarily high number of high-profile cases for example Ted Kaczynski Jeffrey Dahmer OJ Simpson the Menendez brothers and Susan Smith the defense actually labeled Dietz a professional testifier and he did not seem to be bothered by that Dietz had repeatedly been criticized by mental health professionals as harsh and unforgiving toward mentally ill defendants and he has been accused of presenting opinion as fact deed stop treating clients in 1981 or 1982 he couldn't remember which year he said he had last seen a client who had postnatal depression in 1977 and he couldn't say for certain if he had ever seen somebody with postnatal depression who had psychotic features as I mentioned a for he suggested that this fictitious episode of law and order may have given Yates the idea to commit the murders we also see Dietz had an unusual conceptualization of insanity he said that Yates was not insane because she knew what she was doing was wrong he said he knew this because Yates expressed a belief that Satan had ordered her to kill her children as opposed to believing that God had given the order so somebody believes that Satan orders them to commit a crime they know right from wrong but if they believe that God told them to do it they do not know right from wrong his statement is not supported by anything we know about psychosis essentially he's saying that it's the clients belief about the origin of a command that matters Dietz testified that Yates second suicide attempt was deliberately more dramatic so that she could derive benefits from it specifically moving into that new house rusty bought a house after this attempt evidence strongly supported however that she liked living in the bus now as far as the law and order situation when the mistake was uncovered Dietz did admit it but this really highlights how these types of mental health assessments in the context of trials are unreliable with the false testimony Yates was sentenced to life in prison after the mistake was admitted she was found not guilty by reason of insanity her whole life seemed to pivot on this one false statement by a mental health professional who may not have ever even seen a case like that before the problem in the system is not about Dietz specifically it's really about mental health experts testifying testimony is often light on facts and heavy on speculation interestingly if someone did want to connect the eighth's behavior to the media the 1995 movie 7 with Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt did seem to influence Yeats she said she was thinking of that movie the day she committed the homicides she believed she had committed all of the seven deadly sins now it's not unusual in these types of trials to see competing theories from mental health experts the defense in this case really put up a murky narrative that did indicate insanity but they made it seem like they really didn't know exactly what was going on which was actually correct there was a lot of gray area in this case the prosecution however with the help of Dietz put forward a false yet clear narrative and this is the one the jury believed sometimes it's not so much about the accuracy of the story as much as the cohesion of the story working with limited facts mental health expert witnesses craft stories to connect the dots even if there are very few facts they are still compelled to develop a complete story it's frightening that the expert with the most complete story is automatically believed by the jury now the jury that had convicted her said they were persuaded by the testimony of Dietz and by three other factors they bought into Yates own assertion that she was sinning at the time she killed they said that the fact that she called the police meant that she was thinking clearly talk about setting a low bar for thinking clearly would they say that if someone was drunk and they called a cab they were never drunk in the first place the last reason was they thought that because Yates could describe what she did she must have known exactly what she was doing undoubtedly this jury had read the popular court pamphlet how to ridicule logic and convict and three easy steps so what was going on in terms of pathology in this case well Andrea Yates received about every diagnosis related to psychosis that there is her father had depression two of her siblings had depression and another had bipolar so it does make sense that the best guess that the amount of health professionals had would have been major depressive disorder with psychotic features back when this case was going on they would have referred to what they called postpartum depression now it's called peripartum on it's a specifier of major depressive disorder it's called this because we know that 50% of major depressive episodes related to giving birth actually happened before the delivery if a woman has a peripartum psychotic depressive episode the chance that it will recur with a subsequent delivery is between 30 and 50 percent this was such a tragic case it seems as though Yates met the definition for legal insanity this case really highlights how even people who are engaged in mal health treatment can fall through the cracks just about every professional that treated gates recognized or suspected psychosis and many tried to help her but her own symptoms interfered with her receiving proper care she didn't cooperate because of the symptoms and this is a common situation that plays out everyday in mental health treatment facilities now some who have looked at this case have said that Yates should have been hospitalized for years the very first time she presented with psychosis but presentations like this are not unusual if everybody who came into a psychiatric hospital with psychosis was hospitalized for years the system would implode it's really just impossible to provide that level of care to all the people who need it it's kind of a sad state of affairs from what I understand at the time making this video Yates is still in a mental hospital she is eligible for a review each year to see if she can be released but she has never sought release so those are my thoughts on the Andrea Yates case if you like this content please consider supporting me on patreon I have the link for that in the description for this video as always I hope you found my analysis of this topic to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 202,605

Keywords: Andrea yates, rusty yates, michael woronniecki, park dietz, peripartum onset, major depressive disorder, major depressive episode, mental health, counseling

Id: 2bcgyeKHeV8

Length: 17min 21sec (1041 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 10 2020