The murder-suicide of a family challenges our understanding at human, psychological and sociological levels, writes Marie Murray
THE PHENOMENON of familicide is usually defined as a particular kind of murder-suicide in which at least one spouse and one or more children are killed within 24 hours of each other. In some cases the entire family dies together.
The international forensic psychology research into familicide is sparse. Statistically, it is a relatively rare occurrence.
Discrepancies in definition make research reporting cautious. However, if its numbers are tentative its impact is not. It devastates the families involved and their extended families, rocks communities and has psychological reverberations that continue long after the event - as a memory for some and a painful anniversary for others.
In the recent precipitated forays by media into this somewhat obscure psychological domain, a great deal of confusion has arisen between familicide and other situations in which children appear to die at a parental hand such as neonacide, infanticide and filicide. The distinctions are worth noting.
Familicide is not neonacide - the abandonment of the newborn to certain death. This practice has occurred in certain epochs and cultures, including our own, in those heartbreaking instances when new mothers could not face disclosure of their pregnancies or the birth of their babies to a society that would regard both with censure.
Familicide is not the tragic infanticide that arises from severe postnatal depressions for some women. Variously termed puerperal depression, post-partum psychosis or puerperal psychosis, this is a deadly depression in which mothers in the throes of confusion, delusion, preoccupation, hallucination or paranoia may kill their babies and themselves.
Nor is familicide the same as filicide-suicide, especially the so-called altruistic filicide-suicide where mothers who are depressed may believe that they should spare their children the sufferings of this world and so end their own and their children's lives.
Additionally, mothers contemplating their own suicide, sometimes being unable to imagine leaving their children behind, decide to "take them with them".
Familicide is also not the heart-rending situation where a father, during major depression or around the heightened emotion of a custody dispute, ends his own life and that of his children.
Sadly filicide-suicide and familicide can arise in situations of fear of disclosure of sexual abuse of children, substance abuse, marital discord, morbid jealousy, obsessive control and domestic violence, but equally familicide can emerge from what are apparently loving, united and close-knit families and so take clinicians and communities by surprise.
The societal impact of familicide is profound for it makes its way into the heart of a community in which every member tends to feel personally connected to a tragedy. It also induces community guilt because the death of children in a community is always an affront to adults. Adults are there to protect children.
When children die there is incredulity, questions about how this could happen, uncertainty about the personal and community capacity to judge the needs of those in the vicinity and the ultimate concern about whether or not anything could have been done or should have been done that was not done?
Understanding the signs, symptoms and reasons for tragedy is an issue for communities in which mass death takes place. Grief is communal. Yet it is also individual and personal relationships people had with the deceased emerge.
Psychological mechanisms arise for community members such as "death imprint" - the vivid recollections and images imprinted on the memories of people who try to intervene. Helper guilt is common for courageous people who have to abandon rescue attempts.
Media focus and speculation with repetitive discussion and portrayal of images around a tragedy make trauma starker for local families and communities. There is usually a "struggle for significance" - the hope that some meaning, some understanding and some solutions will prevent it happening again. Children in the neighbourhood require age-appropriate information, reassurance and opportunity to express their emotions and access to therapy if friends have died.
The communities in which familicide occurs are shocked. Critical incident intervention is the norm. Additionally, there is research to show that while availability of psychological help is useful, communities draw most strength and gain most therapeutic benefit from each other.
Talking together, organising memorial services, laying flowers, lighting candles and uniting in shared love and concern for those who have died and for each other is psychologically powerful. When the deepest human communal tragedies occur, deep human expression is needed: not theory, not therapy but human connection.
The simultaneous death of an entire family challenges our understanding at human, psychological and sociological levels. We have limited comprehension of why such deaths occur. We have no right to speculate.
At macro levels we need to be cautious about positing causative factors when each instance is different and each family misfortune is unique.
We do not know and can never claim to know what happens in the mind and heart of another person. We do not know what terrors may arise, real or imaginary, that push people to a brink. We need to know what we do not know and know what we have no right to intrude upon.
Marie Murray is a clinical psychologist and director of the student counselling services in UCD; mmurray@irish-times.ie