Hallucinating mum killed, ate her sons

A woman accused of butchering, cooking and eating her two sons last week is believed to have done so because she hallucinated that they were pigs, Mental Health Department deputy director general Kiattiphum Wongrachit said on Tuesday.

"The woman killed her children because she didn't continue her treatment and didn't take her medication," Dr Kiattiphum said.

He said mentally ill patients often became violent and experienced hallucinations if they stopped their regular treatment. About 90 per cent of violent cases involving mentally ill patients were due to lack of regular medication.

The woman, a member of the Musur hilltribe whose name was withheld, will be kept under close watch in the hospital for a long time, he said. The hospital will check whether she is a drug addict and if she will need to keep her calm when she realises that she killed her children, he said.

There are more than 600,000 patients being treated for mental illness by the hospitals under the Health Department, he said.

Police last week received a complaint that a Musur woman butchered her two sons, ages one and five years, in Chiang Mai's Mae Ai district.

Police said they found her asleep at her home, with several body parts apparently from children near her.

They took her in for questioning, but she did not respond to any of their questions.

They did a background check on her and found that she had been treated for a mental illness in 2007.

She has been charged with murder, but being deemed mentally unfit to fight her case she was sent to Suan Prung Hospital for treatment.

Share your thoughts

Discussion 1 : 21/08/2012 at 10:05 PM
How can they prescribe medication and later say they do not even know of she is a drug addict or not? And what medication was she given? Sadly a lot of medication is often even because it is the easier way to deal with someone's problems. Some medication makes situations far worse. I know personally of a woman who was prescribed prozac and went berserk. Despite the warnings to the family doctor and the police, they refused to believe him because the wife's daily doctor insisted she was fine and it was the husband who was just trying to create problems. That woman eventually attacked her husband and 1 year old with a baseball bat. Although the side effects to many drugs (as prozac) are known the doctors tend too often to overlook this in favor of doing what seems the easy way out. The doctor I mention was later sued by the husband and lost her license to practice because she had, despite continued warnings (and other reasons) continued to prescribe the prozac for well over a year.
Discussion 2 : 21/08/2012 at 07:58 PM
If there is a pill that she can be given that will restore her sanity I hope that she spits it out. If she comprehends what she has done she will certainly go off the deep end. Very sad for her family and very sad for her too.
Discussion 3 : 21/08/2012 at 06:10 PM
I would question the Dr's findings, I think a very lame excuse, she failed to take her medicine and blames that, will Thailand ever run out of excuses.

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