UPDATE: Husband of SUV Driver Talks of Wife's Illness

[Moloch]

ST. AUGUSTINE, FL -- Kathy Allen is behind bars in the St. Johns County jail for 3 counts of attempted murder.

Allen's husband of 20 years, Rick Allen, describes her as a loving person who would never intentionally hurt anyone, especially another child, saying "she has suffered from paranoia schizophrenia for many years."

Allen is accused of deliberately running over two young brothers with her SUV on Sunday after the boys apologized to her for hitting her car with a golfball. One of the children, 14 year old Isiah Grayer, is still in critical condition. One of his brothers was also hurt, another got out of the way of the SUV.

Brian Trella, Director of the Psychiatric Unit at Flagler Hospital says Allen suffers from a rare illness that only affects about 3% of the population.

http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/local/news-article.aspx?storyid=28977

Obviously, a ploy for public sympathy. My ex-roomate was a
paranoid schizophrenic, he was no picnic to be around but he never would have run over innocent people. I don't think this is an excuse, and have no sympathy for her.

:nopity: :nopity: :nopity:

If you are just hearing about this worthless freeper-like woman, there
are two other threads on the subject...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1049927
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1054425

[xultar]

1. Not buyin that shit. She ran over those boys cuz she's an evil heffa n/t

[arcos]

2. well, if that's the case she shouldn't be driving in the first place... nt

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

3. This says it all

""All I can do is sit at home, read my bible and pray for my wife and for the boy who is in the hospital."

I call it religious negligence..was he PRAYING she would take her meds? These are the same people who voted Repub so that insanity could not be a defense in the case of murder. These are the same people that railed against "activist" judges because they wanted to see murderers get the death penalty...interesting how much mercy they want when it's their own.

[LisaM]

6. I think it means that's all he can do NOW

it doesn't really get into how he behaved beforehand.

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

13. Actually it does..her specialist says IF she isn't taking her meds

If I had a family member that needed to take meds daily in order to function normally, making sure they took them would be number 1 on my TO DO list.

(not getting testy with you..just sayin')

[LisaM]

38. I don't disagree - I don't think she should have been driving at all

I just don't know the history of his trying to get her to take her medication. She clearly should not have been in a car. I just don't know if it's quite as egregious as the David and Andrea Yates case where he kept making her have children because that's what God wanted.

[merwin]

12. Praying is the preferred method of birth control in red states as well

As is proven by the absurdly high teen pregnancy rates in red states around the country.

[Zero Gravitas]

42. Disgusting

maybe he should have spent less time "praying" and reading his bible and more time looking after his wife. Fucking Republicans.

[slackmaster]

4. Get her adjudicated as incompetent and take away her driver's license

Lock her up if that isn't enough.

[KittyWampus]

5. Both My Brothers Are P.Schizo. & On Heavy Duty Meds

someone needs to supervise and ensure meds are taken daily... or that they show up for their injections.

Sad.

[54anickel]

7. That movie, "A Beautiful Mind" comes to my mind. Could very well be that

she suffers from this, but not a lot of sympathy here.

If she has suffered this for many years (as stated), then the family and doctor should be quite familiar with symptoms of missed dosages of medication. Where was the supervision to assure she was taking the meds?

From the article, it certainly doesn't seem like this was the result of just missing an occassional dosage but rather quiting the meds completely. :shrug:

[fishnfla]

8. You know one person with the disease, and this makes you an expert

brillant. How do you know that this woman is a freeper?

[Moloch]

10. OK. I have had

Amphetamine Psychosis before (which mental health experts would agree mimics Paranoid Schizophrenia exactly, although it is a temporary condition) and I never ran over anybody for accidentally throwing a rock at my precious, precious SUV.

How do I know she's a freeper? Because she places the value of her PROPERTY (Which was not even damaged) above the lives of others. If she isn't a regular poster on Free Republic, she would be right at home there. The sickest thing about American culture is the value placed on mere status symbols and this is an extreme case. I hope this story is very well publicized so that the public can see how materialism is
taken to extreme degrees and that it is not a good thing.

I hope she rots in jail and until the end of her life and goes to hell (if there is such a place)...

[ElectroPrincess]

16. Amphetamine Psychosis has a similar clinical presentation but

I would submit it is a very different condition from that of the brain disease know as Paranoid Schizophrenia.

However, it stands to reason that people who believe in absolutes (right-wrong, good-evil) are more prone to choose amphetamines as their recreational drug of choice. Ergo, the paranoia that occurs with chronic use and the break with reality due to the havoc reeked at the dopamine receptor sites. = the forgoing chemical brain neurotransmitter levels may demonstrate similar outward behaviors among patients with both conditions. But I would hesitate to use the term "exactly mimics" a person suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

Scientists do not know IF the specific reactions within the brain occur in the exact same manner, i.e., is the substance "not released" into the synaptic gap or is it somehow being "prevented uptake" to the neighboring cell. These specific reactions may have behaviorally different manifestations.

Nope, amphetamine psychosis and paranoid schizophrenia are not comparable conditions.

[brentspeak]

22. Er, mental illness affects different people in different ways

You didn't have the same experience when you suffered temporary psychosis -- well, good for you.

This lady apparently had a completely different experience, and, if her husband is to be believed, she's been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia for twenty years.

When you're dealing with the brain, all bets are off. No way to predict what's going to happen.

[Shoeempress]

9. Why does a paranoid schizophrenic have 1. a license, and 2 an SUV?

[BrightKnight]

11. Schizophrenic females are twice as likely to commit crimes

Schizophrenic females were twice as likely to commit crimes as the general population. Crime rates among Schizophrenic males were about the same as the general population.


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?holding=npg&cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=2245262&dopt=Abstract

[ElectroPrincess]

18. oh gosh, that was just one study

yes, Schizophrenic females on a police blotter in Stockholm during 1971. A compilation of data that would validly allow one to claim female schizophrenics are more violent than male schizophrenics has not even begun to be proven.

Remember research based on one sample, one city and one year sampling over years. (isolated sample)

Yes, there's lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Too funny :P

[BrightKnight]

34. It was irresponsible to post that.

It was irresponsible to post that. It was not intended to be mean spirited.

I googled another article that appeared to indicate that schizophrenics might be more likely to commit crimes. The article said that they were susceptible to the same contributing factors as other people. This included disturbed backgrounds, poor social conditions, unemployment, and substance abuse. I suspect that being schizophrenic would likely increase the likelihood of all of these.

More mentally ill people are being moved into the public sector. In most cases this is a good thing. These people are vulnerable and require adequate assistance from the state. "Failure to provide adequate treatment resources can result in an increased social burden of criminal offending. “This is particularly true if patients with dual diagnoses of mental and addictive disorders are left untreated."


http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/39/10/34?maxtoshow=&HITS=20&hits=20&RESULTFORMAT=&stored_search=&FIRSTINDEX=0&tocsectionid=Clinical*&displaysectionid=Clinical+and+Research+News&journalcode=psychnews

[iverglas]

46. dual diagnoses -- coincidental article

I was looking at the CBC's on-line article about the same-sex marriage decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, and happened to see this:

http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2004/12/09/alcohol-report-041209.html
(emphasis added)

Depression more common among substance abusers: report

Last Updated Thu, 09 Dec 2004 10:49:04 EST

OTTAWA - Heavy drinkers or drug users are much more likely than teetotalers to become depressed, just as people with the mental illness more often develop addictions, a Statistics Canada study suggests.

The report, released Thursday, indicates that adult Canadians who rely on illicit drugs are more than six times as likely to suffer through a major depressive episode than those who never touch them.

... However, one of the report's authors warns that it would be dangerous to conclude that substance abuse causes depression or vice versa.

"It's the chicken and the egg," Michael Tjepkema, an analyst with Statistics Canada's Health Statistics Division, told CBC News Online.

"It's a complex relationship and it's hard to really disentangle all of these factors that are going on at the same time. ...They kind of promote each other: it's a reciprocal influence."

The figures reported in the article were derived from the 2002 Canadian Community Health Survey, based on nearly 37,000 personal interviews.

Dual diagnosis is of course a huge problem in treating both the addiction and the underlying/resulting mental illness.

[ElectroPrincess]

14. I can't believe this is DU ...

As a person who has earned a masters degree in physiological psychology, I must tell you folks - you have it WRONG.

Like the man who shot Reagan (Hinkley), this woman has a *psychotic* condition. How well did you really know your room mate? I would bet money at the time he was *stabilized* on medication. Schizophrenia is a chronic disease of the brain. The simplest analogy can be to, well perhaps multiple sclerosis (MS) which can go into "remission" but can not ever be cured.

Many of you folks seem not only heartless and devoid of mercy but lacking any thoughtful understanding of mental illness. Specifically psychotic episodes repeatedly occur to those who suffer from schizophrenia.

She should be treated in a mental institution not a prison.

[Moloch]

15. Is that an excuse?

In one of the earlier stories, it says that after she ran down the boys that a person came up to her and asked her why she did that and she replied that they were throwing rocks at her car. It was a golfball. That doesn't sound like a hallucination or that she felt her life was being threatened. She may well suffer from paranoid schizophrenia, but I believe she did this out of hate and vengeance.

[ElectroPrincess]

17. If you don't have behind a lock-up clinical experience, you

cannot speak with any confidence what exactly was going on in this womans mind. Again, she has a disease that causes her to misperceive reality.

[Moloch]

19. I'm basing it on what she said...

Granted, I don't have the psychology background that you do, but wouldn't even a paranoid schizophrenic person show some kind of remorse
for almost killing two people?

[brentspeak]

23. Assuming that she's psychotic

probably not.

[Moloch]

25. Well so was Charles Manson...

and he is locked up for life, exactly what should happen to her.

[brentspeak]

28. That she should be locked up, I agree

but if she really has been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, it would be monsterous to send her to prison instead of a psychiatric facility.

Manson was more of a psychopathic/sociopathic personality than a strictly mentally ill person (ie. delusions, voices in the head)

[Divernan]

30. See Post 27. It IS monstrous that there are no psychiatric

facilities, at least publicly funded, for people like this woman. If you are very wealthy, you can have the judge you play golf with commit your embarassingly crazy relative commited to a pricey private institution. There may be a few token "public" facilities, or psych beds in hospitals, but they are miniscule relative to the need for same.

[brentspeak]

31. It's ridiculous: one has to be connected to many, many millions of dollars

to land a permanent (or even long-term) spot in a private psychiatric hospital. What is per day? Like $800, probably more? Even an upper-middle class insurance policy wouldn't last very long at that rate today. It's just a horrible mess.

[ElectroPrincess]

32. No both schizophrenia and antisocial personality disorder (Manson)

qualify under the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders) as "mental illness." My main point is that those who suffer genuine psychosis (schizophrenics) usually have a warped sense of reality and right vs. wrong (some of them think they're doing God's work). Therefore, they're more likely to be found INNOCENT by reason of insanity when LEGAL criteria is applied.

Sociopaths and Manic-Depressives still have, albeit tenuous, a grip on reality and know at the time of the crime, that the action was WRONG.

Edited for goofy/wrong terminology <blush>

[Divernan]

27. You don't know much about mental institutions, do you?

I do, because I (B.S. in psych; M.A. in applied social research;; J.D.)spent ten years in state government fighting the republicans to keep state institutions for the mentally ill and mentally retarded open. No one really knows how many mentally ill and/or retarded people have been convicted of crime and incarcerated, because the states do not want to be embarassed by having such statistics gathered or published. But one police association I worked with estimated 40% of prison inmates are mentally ill and/or retarded. Given that people such as this driver are left in society to self-medicate (and I assume you learned in your studies that because of the extremely unpleasant side effect of various psycho-tropic medications, a great many people stop taking them), I would rather have her in jail than on the streets running down teenage kids.

[iverglas]

40. oh, you better believe it

If you haven't seen it before, you haven't been looking.

I have not read any reports about the incident, so I won't comment on the specifics of this woman's condition and actions.

But I am not even slightly surprised to find people who know very little more than I do saying the things you're shocked and appalled at.

There are a lot of people here, just like in the real world, who do not know and do not wish to know how psychosis affects the thoughts and actions of people who suffer from it.

If they did, they might not be able to point that satisfying finger of blame at somebody.

Hell, a person who commits a violent crime while suffering from a delusion that made the act necessary/appropriate in his/her mind still needs to be held accountable for it, doncha know??

There's just nothing quite as satisfying, for some people, as moral outrage.

If only they'd make the effort to know enough to get morally outraged at the things and people that actually deserve it.

But of course, making an effort ... and possibly discovering that laying blame where it belongs might mean coughing up some taxes to solve the real problems ... isn't nearly as much fun as yapping about "personal responsibility".

[Dem2theMax]

20. Sounds like it's time for some education.

http://www.schizophrenia.com/diag.html

I'd suggest a hour or so of reading. Schizophrenia is a disease of the brain. Oh to be able to let people who do not understand mental illness have a taste of it. That would take care of the attitudes like this.

[ElectroPrincess]

26. I like your attitude Dem2theMax

My father has "broke with reality" due to being in the final stages of Alzheimer's' Disease. I call him at the Veterans' Home and he often hangs up on me in the middle of the conversation. It tears your heart out.

My cousin committed suicide with a shot gun. Not being glib, but if you are able to kill yourself with a shot gun, you *really* were depressed and hell bent to put an end to the pain.

Unless mental illness affects your immediate family, it's so damn easy to judge in terms of right vs. wrong and "the law" absolutes.

Although I find many of your comments heartless and ill-informed, I also hope you never have to experience having a loved one lose their sense of reality. Such depths of pain you will not know.

[Dem2theMax]

35. I'm hoping that this sentence was in reply to the original poster.

"Although I find many of your comments heartless and ill-informed, I also hope you never have to experience having a loved one lose their sense of reality. Such depths of pain you will not know."

Because, believe me, when I talk about mental illness, I'm speaking from personal experience.

[ElectroPrincess]

41. Yes, of course! It's like there's just a few of us stationed

outside the jail, hopelessly trying to fend of the self-appointed mob of figurative vigilantes.

Such willful ignorance is frightening since we all know someone suffering with some form of mental illness. For example, at any given time, up to 10 percent of the general population can be Dx as significantly (qualifying in the DSM-IV criteria) clinically depressed.

It's like people are afraid to acknowledge that "the great oz" proves to be a little old man. Toto, how dare you pull back that curtain!?! Shhh! Let's just pretend such conditions do NOT exist.

[Moloch]

29. Ok, I will look at your site.

I am not saying that we should execute her, but even if she was paranoid schizophrenic that does not excuse what she did.

[Dem2theMax]

37. I appreciate that you'll take the time to read up on the disease.

As for 'excusing' what she did, I don't know that I would choose that word. If someone is out of their mind, how do you blame them? Do we blame the disease? Do we blame the people who should have been watching her more carefully? Her doctors, her family?
Until the public at large can truly understand mental illness, I don't think we'll get to a point where we can properly take care of people who have these horrible diseases. And in the process, stop the horrible things that can happen to anyone in the wake of a mental illness, whether it be the person who is ill or the person who may be hurt because of that illness. No matter which way you look at it, it's heartbreaking for all concerned.

[iverglas]

43. "but even if she was paranoid schizophrenic ...

... that does not excuse what she did."

Maybe not in your mind ... but there's just no accounting for tastes, is there?

There's actually no question of "excusing" anything. An excuse is a reason for doing something that we recognize as making what was done forgiveable. Extreme provocation may be an "excuse" for committing a crime. A person who is "excused" must still have been responsible for what s/he did when s/he did it.

Being paranoid schizophrenic may mean that a person is NOT RESPONSIBLE for what s/he does -- if s/he does it as a result of a belief that is caused by the disease and is contrary to reality.

"Not guilty by reason of insanity", and its various modern formulations, is not an EXCUSE. It is a DEFENCE -- a claim that the person did not do what s/he is accused of doing. I can't figure out what so many people fail to grasp in this concept, which has been part of our legal tradition for a very long time.

That's because (most) crimes consist of two elements: the acts and the intent. If you kill someone by complete, non-negligent accident -- if you trip and fall on his/her head, for instance -- you are *not* guilty of murder.

If you kill Person A because you really and truly believe -- as a result of a delusionary mental illness -- that Person A is the devil incarnate and is strangling the baby s/he is holding, then you are *not* guilty of homicide.

However, someone who is paranoid schizophrenic might also kill another person in order to steal his/her wallet -- or, yes, because s/he hates that person for reasons having nothing to do with the illness -- and not because of any delusion at all.

So you're right, suffering from a delusionary mental illness would not "excuse" what she did.

But it MIGHT mean that she was not RESPONSIBLE for what she did, and therefore that she doesn't NEED any excuse -- and that it would be inhumane, and a violation of rights, to punish her for doing it.

As I said before, I do not know remotely enough about this person to have any opinion about her own responsibility, but I do know enough about mental illness and about law to say that a person who does commit a crime because of a delusionary belief is not responsible for the act.

[Dem2theMax]

45. Standing and applauding.

:thumbsup:

[AlCzervik]

21. He should have tried to keep her from driving

[Minstrel Boy]

24. "about 3% of the population"

is still nearly 9 million people.

[George_S]

33. Pot calling the kettle black?

Yeah, methinks, nice try.

[alexisfree]

36. Yeah a loving person who hates minorities and has a pro bush sticker

[George_S]

39. Let's see what we have so far...

1. She's racist.
2. Her husband is misogynist (wanted her barefoot and pregnant).
3. She drives a bad car.
4. She had a Bush bumper sticker.
5. She lives in a red state.
6. The bitch voted for Bush.

All we need is for her to think the kids are gay and she will be 100$ demonized and the Dems will be 100% cool.

Ah, how sweet it is. Nothing like the scapegoated gaining enough power to hunt and scapegoat; well, except for the smell of napalm in the morning. That's cool too.

[snooper2]

44. Does anybody here think she would have run over 3 white girls, 9-12yrs?

And, why isn't this all over CNN...

Scott Peterson, Koby, blah blah, this should be a cheap story for them to cover, trial and all....

hmmmm...