Date of publication: 6 Apr 2022 • 7 hours ago • 3 minutes reading • 11 Comments Andrea Yates is standing with her lawyer George Parnham as the verdict of innocence for insanity is read at her retrial on July 26, 2006 in Houston, Texas. Photo: BRETT COOMER / AFP / Getty Images
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A Texas woman who drowned her five children – aged 7 to six months – denies being released from a psychiatric hospital each year despite being eligible for a review.
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Andrea Gates, 57, has been treated at Kerville State Hospital since 2007. However, she has refused to be screened for the past 15 years, People magazine reported, preferring to continue her treatment. He has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and postpartum psychosis. “It’s where he wants to be. “Where it should be,” George Parnam’s former lawyer told ABC13. “And I mean, hypothetically, where would he go? What would he do? “ In June 2001, after drowning her five children in a bathtub at her home in a Houston suburb, she called police. Then she called her husband and told him to go home. Yates, who was influenced by the teachings of conservative Christian minister Michael Woroniecki, reportedly believed that their assassination would save their souls.
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“If I did not, he would be tormented by Satan,” he said in an interview from prison. Gates suffered from severe depression and had attempted suicide several times. Despite a series of hospital visits, pre-drowning treatments were unsuccessful. This image released by Houston Police shows Andrea Pia Yates on June 21, 2001, following the arrest and murder charge – multiple charges in the June 20 deaths of her five children, Mary 6 months, Luke 2, Paul 3, John 5 and Noah 7 Photo by HO / AFP / Getty Images “Eventually, he received a cocktail of drugs containing an antipsychotic agent. The drug was obviously effective, but Andrea believed she had been given “truth serum, which made her lose control of herself,” according to an article in The Lancet. “Despite a psychiatrist warning that having another child would almost certainly trigger another psychotic episode, the Yateses had a fifth child.” Yates ended up giving birth to a daughter, Mary. Her mental health continued to decline. When she was discharged from one of her hospital visits, the doctor advised “someone to stay with her at all times and not to be alone with her children,” according to court documents.
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In May 2001, her husband’s mother noticed that she was filling the bathtub in her house for no apparent reason. When asked, she told her mother-in-law that she “might need it”. Yates visited her doctor on June 18 and denied having “psychotic symptoms or suicidal thoughts.” Two days later she killed her children. He was convicted of murder in 2002, but was considered a felony because one of the psychiatrists gave false testimony. He was acquitted of insanity in 2006. “There is not a day that she does not care, that she does not talk, that she is happy for her children’s lives before June 20 – and that she mourns for her children,” Parnham told Today. This undated file shows four of Yates’s five children, right, Noah, 7, John, 5, Paul, 3, and Luke, 2. Photo by AFP / Getty Images Parnam is in contact with Gates and said she is making small items for the state hospital, such as cards, aprons and gifts, to sell. The money she earns goes to the Yates Children Memorial Fund, which Parnham and his wife started to raise women’s awareness about mental health.
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Many mental health advocates were pleased with the outcome of the latest ruling, with American Psychiatric Association (APA) Vice President Dr. Nanda Stotland calling it a “relief.” “It was clear that some people were influenced by their strong feelings about the sanctity of motherhood,” she said. “They could not accept any excuse for a mother harming her children. “They considered it necessary for the court to send a message that would convince other mothers out there that they could not harm their children.” He added that “many people simply do not believe in psychiatric conditions as genuine illnesses”. At the time of the first trial, the APA issued a statement stressing the importance of understanding mental illness. “Victims of mental illness are sick – just as sick as if they had cancer or chronic heart failure – and, as human beings, deserve human and effective treatment for their illness. “Prisons are overloaded with mentally ill prisoners, most of whom are not receiving adequate treatment,” they said. “Defendants whose crimes stem from their mental illness should be sent to a hospital and treated – not in prison, much less in death.”
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