TESTS OF FAITH
Andrea Yates and Deanna Laney murdered their children in response to voices in their heads that told them, quite convincingly, that they had to kill their kids to save them. Yates is serving life in prison, while Laney is in a mental institution, for legal reasons interestingly explained in this article in the Sunday Dallas Morning News: Yates knew she was doing wrong; she just thought it was necessary to save her children from hell. Laney thought God wanted her to kill her kids, making it the right thing to do.
Laney's story is particularly sad, because nobody around her knew she was having delusions. She interpreted her mental illness through her Penecostal faith, and neither she nor those around her found the voices she heard particularly crazy.
Mental health experts also found evidence that Mrs. Laney had been mentally ill for three years and had several earlier psychotic breaks that went unrecognized.
They said her problems went unnoticed and untreated because they seemed unremarkable to her and everyone around her, even when she frantically told relatives and tearfully testified in church about three years ago that God had told her directly that the world was ending and she needed to get her house in order.
Mrs. Laney, who home-schooled her children and rarely left Smith County, and her friends and family are lifelong members of a Pentecostal church. Their church, Tyler's First Assembly of God, teaches that God communicates directly with man, the Lord and the devil can test faith, and believers touched by the Holy Spirit can speak in tongues.
With the verdict, Mrs. Laney will be committed to a state psychiatric hospital until its experts convince state District Judge Cynthia Kent that she no longer is a danger to herself or others. Under state law, she could be kept there for life.
In her 6 ½-hour videotaped interview with prosecution psychiatrist Park Dietz, Mrs. Laney tearfully recounted the savage attacks and the torture that followed.
"I didn't want to kill my kids at all....I felt I like I had no choice," she said. "Because God told me to do that, and I was taught you obey God."...
Despite her turmoil, she said, she refused medication until after Joshua's birthday in late July.
She believed he'd be "raised up" from the dead on his ninth birthday, but began wondering if something was wrong with her when that didn't happen. So she finally told a psychiatrist who visited her weekly that she was smelling sulfur in her cell and believed it was a sign that the devil was near.
She said she did not mention it earlier, even when it became so intense that she couldn't sleep, because she believed everything happening to her "was spiritual warfare, and I didn't think he would understand any of it."
She said she was bothered four years earlier by a similar smell — which psychiatrists have now identified as an olfactory hallucination symptomatic of psychosis. "I just thought it was the Lord teaching me. I didn't think anything about it, that it could be some sort of a mental disorder. That never crossed my mind."
The smell vanished a few days after she began taking anti-psychotic medication and antidepressants, she said, along with racing thoughts that "everything meant something" and inner urgings that she believed were direct messages from God.
But she also lost her certainty that what she'd done to her three boys was the Lord's will and test. "I started realizing that he wouldn't do something like that," she said.
It's a terribly sad story. I can't help wondering, however, what pundits would say about similarly ill killers who interpreted their delusions through video games, pornography, comic books, shopping, or movies rather than religion. We don't blame Penecostalism for the deaths of Laney's children, nor should we. But the reason we don't is that there's (fortunately) no loud anti-religion lobby looking for any excuse to blame Penecostalism for all the troubles of the world.