It was DuPage County’s very own au pair trial, with a twist.
It featured grieving parents, an in-home caretaker accused of killing their 5-month-old boy and a defense strategy that attempted to vilify the child’s parents.
The story that unfolded locally, however, contained a different subplot from the Cambridge, Mass., case, a subplot that should have prompted jeers from mental health advocates.
Defendant Donna Gist–older and darker-skinned than the baby-faced Louise Woodward– was convicted of first-degree murder in spite of efforts by her lawyers to “try” Kathleen Hendrickson, the baby’s mother, instead.
Hendrickson’s “fault” was not that she put her career before her babies. It was that she suffered depression and anxiety, and sought intensive psychiatric treatment a month before the baby was killed.
Hendrickson sat stoically in a Wheaton courtroom as defense lawyer Tom Breen tried to draw the focus away from Gist and toward Hendrickson’s depression.
“Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing or why,” is one thing Hendrickson had told her doctors, and Breen told the jurors.
Her medication list was as long as a child’s Christmas list: Zoloft, Paxil, Wellbutrin, Xanax, Klonopin, Serzone, lithium . . .
“Aha,” was supposed to be the collective response from jurors. An overwhelmed mother, drugged to the max, suffering from mental illness, was likely to snap in frustration and shake her baby to death, the defense theory went.
As often is the case when the storyteller is an advocate of a theory, some facts about depression were overshadowed by the defense bravado.
Depression is an illness of lethargy, and its sufferers are not typically more likely to commit homicide than those who are not depressed, mental health experts say.
It’s an illness of hopelessness, despair, confusion, worry and inaction, not one of uncontrollable rage or a tendency to lash out.
“Ordinarily, people who have major depressions don’t have enough energy or organization to commit murder,” said Dr. Robert deVito, professor of psychiatry at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood.
It can happen, but it is more likely that a depressed person who commits murder would take his own life afterward, DeVito said.
The prison population is filled not with criminals who were depressed when they arrived, but with psychopaths and those with personality disorders, according to psychiatric experts.
Most depression sufferers are on the outside, and many are getting the treatment they need.
Medications to treat depression are wonder drugs for some, but they are not without side effects. It is typical for a patient to try half a dozen before finding one that works.
In some ways, Hendrickson was lucky–she sought the help she needed while millions whose symptoms go unrecognized live miserable lives and often succumb to suicide–a much more likely scenario than homicide, according to mental health experts.
But Hendrickson got bitten in the behind by her decision to seek treatment. She could not have known it would work out that way.
It’s absurd to suggest she should have hesitated and thought: “Wait. I better not go see a psychiatrist because I might be accused of murder someday.”
But too many people with unsettled minds, fraught with emotional turmoil, do stay away from professionals. The stigma of mental illness lingers in spite of the great strides made by mental health organizations, individual doctors and brain researchers.
Hendrickson did her part to foster those efforts.
She waived her legal right to keep her medical information confidential.
She sat silently during days of humiliating testimony even though her shaking head indicated an overwhelming temptation to shout out something like, “I’m depressed, for God’s sake. Some of your neighbors probably are too. It contributes absolutely zero to the question of who killed my baby.”
As much as 12 percent of the population will suffer at least one episode of major depression during their lives, DeVito says.
Millions more suffer, or will suffer, a milder form of the illness–a chronic low-grade depression. Still others suffer from atypical depression and bipolar disorders.
“They are treatable illnesses,” DeVito says. “Eighty to 85 percent who are treated show significant improvement.”
And treatment would offset the likelihood, no matter how small, of murder or suicide, he said.
“These illnesses shouldn’t carry the stigma they once did,” he said. “Yet here we are, getting into the late ’90s, and there are those who are very stigmatized by mental illness.
“There’s a lot more work to do in that area.”
To that end, maybe mental health advocates should adopt Kathleen Hendrickson as their poster child for the new millennium.
