Murder Prozac 01/03/1998 California Mother Suffocates her 3 Children
Summary:
Ann Tracy, Ph.D., Executive Director of the International Coalition for Drug Awareness, confirmed that this woman was taking Prozac at the time of the murders.
Paragraph 5 reads: "Megan Hogg's attorney, George Walker, rejects claims of evil and will build a defense based on Hogg's history of depression, seizures and use of strong prescription drugs that could have provoked a psychotic episode the night her three children died."
http://home.att.net/~revdak/spir243/lecture08.htm
Psychology and Spirituality
Pastoral Ministries Program, Santa Clara University
(last taught Winter 2002)
Lecture 8: Evil
Newspaper: San Jose Mercury, March 28, 1998, pp. 1B and 4B
Mother's arrest sparks sanity debate
- Was she insane or evil?
- This week Bay Area residents are searching for answers after 25-year-old Megan Hogg was arrested and charged with murdering her three daughters. Hogg could face the death penalty if convicted...
- "This is the most evil act I have ever seen," said Daly City police Lt. Steve Lowe, "There can be no reason for killing your kids."
- Such crimes have a high shock value, experts say, because of the sacred bond society assumes between mother and child.
- For police and prosecutors, breaking this bond is one of the most heinous crimes imaginable...
- Megan Hogg's attorney, George Walker, rejects claims of evil and will build a defense based on Hogg's history of depression, seizures and use of strong prescription drugs that could have provoked a psychotic episode the night her three children died.
- "I cannot believe that God made her evil from the egg," said Walker, noting that the first time he met Hogg he was struck by how tiny she was. "This was a blip on this otherwise normal, non-criminal life..."
- [Mothers who kill older children] frequently attempt to kill themselves, as Hogg did, as well as their children, and some succeed. Experts call this "altruistic filicide," and say these women are usually mentally ill.
- "You have a depressed mother who has become somewhat psychotic," explained Redwood City-based forensic expert George Wilkinson. "She believes that the world is so awful and unbearable a place for her that it would be unconscionable to allow her children to suffer (in it alone)."
- "There is a delusional quality, but it has a rational aspect," Wilkinson said, "once you get into the delusion."
- Experts say these suicidal mothers love their children and feel the children cannot exist without them.
- "These mothers tend to be well aware of their children as children, that's part of their pain," Wilkinson said. "They're trying to save the children they love."
- Wilkinson said he has examined several mothers who fit this category after they killed their children.
- "They were emotionally impoverished people," he added.
- The Language of Evil: rooted in human experiences.
- Example: A man addressing an evangelical who was insistently asking "Do you believe in the Devil? said: "I don't need to believe; I've seen him." Sharing in twos:
- Where have you seen/experienced what you would describe as "evil"?
- What was it like? What were its qualities?
- How did you feel?
- How do you understand the experience now?
- The language of evil
- How do we use the language of evil? What purposes are served?
- social control
- self-defense- distancing from the uncanny, unusual or frightening
- ego protection
- How do we see the language of "evil" being used tdoay?
- discourse following September 11
- President Bush's "Axis of Evil"
- See Taliban cartoon
- Satire: "The Axis of Just as Evil" (satirewire.com)
- Definitions (Diamond, 1996):
- Sanford and Comstock-- sociological study Sanctions for Evil: "In using the word evil we mean not that an act or pattern of life is necessarily a sin or a crime according to some law, but rather that it leads to damage or pain suffered by people, to social destructiveness of a degree so serious as to call for use of an ancient, heavily freighted term." (56)
- "evil can be considered that tendency which- whether in oneself or others- would inhibit personal growth and expansion, destroy or limit innate potentialities, curtail freedom, fragment or distintigrate the personality, and diminish the quality of personal relationships. (56, italics in original)
- Existential evil-- natural disasters; accidents
- Human evil: "those attitudes and behaviors that promote excessive interpersonal aggression, cruelty, hostility, disregard for the integrity of others, self-destructiveness, psychopathology, and human misery in general." (57: italics in original)
- Can be single person (individual evil) or a group, country or culture (collective evil)