Exorcism: a leading cause of filicide in the US?

[struggle4progress]

... Dr. Phillip Resnick, a professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland ..., who has for 40 years evaluated parents accused of killing their kids, ... said one out of every 33 homicides in the United States is the killing of a child under 18 by their parent, or between 250 and 300 of the country's killings each year. In a 2005 study, he found filicide to be the third-leading cause of death of American children ages 5 to 14 ...
Crime of parents killing their kids is not so uncommon
Article by: LARRY OAKES , Star Tribune
Updated: July 14, 2012

... Most research concerning filicide has focused on the mother and has looked at the crime from a variety of different perspectives ... The strongest general risk factor that was identified through an analysis by Friedman et al. was a history of suicidality and depression or psychosis and past use of psychiatric services ... Fathers are less often considered as the perpetrators in filicide cases, and consequently, there is much less focus on them in the literature. However, they are responsible for a large portion of child murder and worthy of independent investigation ... Psychosis seems to be common in men who commit filicide ...
Psychiatry (Edgmont). 2007 February; 4(2): 48–57
An Overview of Filicide
Sara G. West, MD

... Resnick's review of the world psychiatric literature on maternal filicide found filicidal mothers to have frequent depression, psychosis, prior mental health treatment, and suicidal thoughts. Maternal filicide perpetrators have five major motives: a) in an altruistic filicide, a mother kills her child out of love; she believes death to be in the child's best interest (for example, a suicidal mother may not wish to leave her motherless child to face an intolerable world; or a psychotic mother may believe that she is saving her child from a fate worse than death); b) in an acutely psychotic filicide, a psychotic or delirious mother kills her child without any comprehensible motive (for example, a mother may follow command hallucinations to kill); c) when fatal maltreatment filicide occurs, death is usually not the anticipated outcome; it results from cumulative child abuse, neglect, or Munchausen syndrome by proxy; d) in an unwanted child filicide, a mother thinks of her child as a hindrance; e) the most rare, spouse revenge filicide occurs when a mother kills her child specifically to emotionally harm that child's father ...
World Psychiatry. 2007 October; 6(3): 137–141.
Child murder by mothers: patterns and prevention
SUSAN HATTERS FRIEDMAN and PHILLIP J RESNICK

[Warren Stupidity]

1. has anyone made that claim?

or are you just propping up straw-demons to exorcise?

By the way, since major religious institutions claim that demonic possession is real, is not delusional, who are you and your references to dispute those claims and categorize a person who acts on their belief that their child is possessed by demons as suffering from a delusion?

[struggle4progress]

2. I think we're all naturally concerned about filicide and so would like to understand

its etiology and epidemiology, with an eye towards reducing the incidence rate

As I understand some of the posts we have seen in this group, there are people who believe that one of the things we should do is to eliminate religion, the theory being that some causal chain connects religion to personal ideas about demons and so leads to horrific events, with mothers stabbing or strangling their babies

My own tendency is to suspect that some parents will explain or excuse their filicides, or filicidal attempts, using whatever ideas seem most handy at the moment, while recognizing that (say) what might seem handy to an person suffering a schizophrenic episode will not seem so immediately handy to the rest of the world -- but in this group, it seems that such an approach is often denounced as apologetic, or dishonest, or hateful, and therefore perhaps it is well to actual examine what the professionals think

[Warren Stupidity]

3. ah so having agreed that your first straw demon was bullshit, you've summoned a new one.

no, nobody has claimed we need to eliminate religion either. Perhaps you are confusing that with the claim that we would be better off without religion. I do think there was a suggestion that religious institutions stop teaching their gullible followers that demonic possession is real. Perhaps that is something you might want to attack, as it is something that has actually been asserted here. On the other hand standing up un-made foolish arguments to attack is more fun, so carry on.

[trotsky]

4. Wow, someone has claimed that we need to eliminate religion?

Who did that? Do you have a link?

You wouldn't just be making that up as a straw man, would you?

[struggle4progress]

6. IIRC you yourself regularly assert

the world would be better off without it

[Warren Stupidity]

7. which is a completely different claim than "it should be eliminated".

Your arguments here are shamelessly dishonest.

[skepticscott]

14. Is this a surprise

coming from someone who spends days desperately searching the internet for anything he can find to distract people from a simple truth? There's something almost creepy about the inability of certain posters here to acknowledge certain things about religion. But, that's what religion does to people.

[Warren Stupidity]

15. no, unfortunately there appear to be three prolific posters here who are consistently dishonest

but the dishonesty needs to be pointed out, over and over and over.

[skepticscott]

16. Only three?

I think you're being generous. Especially if you include not only blatant and deliberate lies, but also other, more weaselly forms of intellectual dishonesty.

[trotsky]

8. I really do believe it would.

But you understand that's not the same as saying I want to eliminate it, right?

I would rather see it just fade away as people stop buying into the myths.

[Act_of_Reparation]

5. Eliminate religion?

My own tendency is to suspect that some parents will explain or excuse their filicides, or filicidal attempts, using whatever ideas seem most handy at the moment, while recognizing that (say) what might seem handy to an person suffering a schizophrenic episode will not seem so immediately handy to the rest of the world -- but in this group, it seems that such an approach is often denounced as apologetic, or dishonest, or hateful, and therefore perhaps it is well to actual examine what the professionals think

Your own tendency is to make excuses whenever somebody bats a critical eye towards religion or the religious. You did it with the postal service "losing" atheists' mail, you did it with honor killings in Pakistan, and now you're doing it here. It's therefore my tendency not to care what your tendency is, for all your appeals to what the "experts" say, you and I both know you aren't exactly going to get off your ass and look.

[struggle4progress]

9. I'm sorry you didn't appreciate my defense of USPS in that thread last March,

but the Berlin shoe company sent material internationally to US addresses via a private company DHL -- which in my experience, and which according to links I provided in that thread, typically itself delivers the packages to the USPS office nearest the final destination, leaving only the last few miles of transport and the final delivery to the USPS

The shoe company sought publicity, claiming USPS was delaying their packages, citing as evidence only some gross transit time statistics, without an effort to discern which part of the time-in-transit should be allocated to DHL and which part of the time-in-transit should be allocated to USPS, and without any effort to identify and correct for potential confounding variables such as holidays and weekends

If that, in your eyes, is evidence of "make excuses whenever somebody bats a critical eye towards religion," then I can only say we use words in entirely different ways and have quite different notions about principled statistical argument

[Act_of_Reparation]

11. You're a true hero

[struggle4progress]

10. So far as I recall, I have not posted anything in this forum on honor killings in Pakistan

and I have no specific memory of earlier postings on the subject

Perhaps you can provide a link

I'm quite sure I have never said anything in favor of honor killings: I find the notion quite disgusting

[Act_of_Reparation]

12. Oh, my apologies. It was Bangladesh. And there are many instances...

...of which this is one.

Don't bother reiterating here what you said there. It wasn't convincing a year ago, and it isn't convincing now. Save both of us the time and the trouble.

Now, if you'll excuse me, having not received the grace of the sacraments in over a decade, I am overcome with the sudden urge to spit split pea soup on my bedroom walls. I may be indisposed for the next several hours.

[struggle4progress]

13. You're quite careless with your terminology. "Honor killing" refers to the barbaric practice

of killing a daughter or sister, believed to have brought some "dishonor" on the family

Hena Akhter was the victim of a small-town lynching to cover-up her uncle's sexual assault on her: after the girl was raped, an illegal "village counsel," composed mostly of relatives of the rapist and his wife, meeting in the home of the rapist and his wife, proclaimed it a case of adultery and (contrary to the laws of Bangladesh) sentenced her to be beaten by another of those relatives and her rapist (as the other alleged adulterer) to be beaten by one of his relatives. The rapist somehow escaped the beating without injury. The girl was fatally beaten. The first autopsy by local doctors found no injuries on her and ruled suicide was the cause of death; this finding was overturned after a later autopsy. Issues here include inadequate rural access to the courts, illegal small-town village-counsel trials and sentences, and local corruption