Maternal filicide and mental illness: A descriptive study of 17 women hospitalized in a French secure unit over a 24‐year period

Abstract

Maternal filicide is defined as the murder of a child by its mother. Many classifications have been elaborated based on underlying motives such as altruism, mental pathology, fatal maltreatment, spousal revenge, or an unwanted child. Pathological filicide refers to cases in which the perpetrator has a major psychiatric illness. Related literature is sparse. The present work proposes to identify the main characteristics of mentally ill filicidal mothers. This study was based on data gathered through a retrospective chart review of all filicidal women admitted to the Henri Colin secure unit (France) between 1996 and 2019 (N = 17). Most filicidal mothers had a dysfunctional childhood marked by emotional neglect, intrafamilial violence, or social isolation. They were often married, on average about 32 years old. We found a history of attempted filicide in 3 cases, and abuse or neglect in 3 other cases. The victim's average age was 6.2 years old, and in several cases, multiple siblings were murdered. Half of the filicidal mothers had a history of psychiatric disorders. Three different diagnoses were found in our study: bipolar or depressive disorders (41.2%); schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders (41.2%); personality disorders (17.6%). We identified two subgroups, as having different motivational profiles. In the first group, filicide is a defensive reaction to a perceived threat:The murder is committed under the influence of hallucinations or delusions. In the second group, filicide is linked to a context of separation, real or imagined. Several forensic and psychopathologic features associated with each profile are detailed.

Lethal and severe violence: Characterizing Swedish female offenders with and without a severe mental disorder

“…For example, for obvious reasons, studies on intimate partner homicide (15, 16) have a higher prevalence of offenders within intimate partner relations/marriage. Further, there was also a high prevalence of adverse childhood experience and lifetime victimization within the total sample of female offenders, which likewise is consistent with prior research (20,26,27,29,31). In conclusion, regarding background factors, the results in the present study were in line with previous studies, and also merge previous disparate results.…”

“…Moreover, in line with previous studies (20,23), the SMD group unsurprisingly showed a higher prevalence of psychiatric diagnoses, in particular, psychotic disorders compared to the no-SMD group. The no-SMD group instead had a higher prevalence of personality disorders, which is in line with previous research on female lethal and severe violent offenders within prison samples (31,34).…”

Violence Risk Assessment and Risk Management: Case-Study of Filicide in an Italian Woman

“…Although other researchers analysed the cases of filicidal mothers [ 59 , 60 , 61 ], few studies have focused on other aspects besides psychiatric issues. For example, Ben Ammar and colleagues [ 62 ] used the same research design as our study to analyse the association between Delusional misidentification syndromes (DMS) and the murder of a child by his mother.…”

Filicide-Suicide by hanging involving an autistic child: A rare case report

“…Approximately 40%-50% of filicide-suicides are committed by mothers (D'Argenio et al, 2013) and in relation to filicide, the literature appears to focus more on maternal filicide (West et al, 2009) and cases of maternal filicide over the last 20 years has been thoroughly investigated in developed countries including France (Raymond et al, 2021), and Japan (Yasumi, 2018), as well as in the developing countries such as Mexico (Rodríguez et al, 2021), and India (Gowda et al, 2018).…”