The Julie Schenecker Tragedy: Negligence, Finger-Pointing and the Death of Children

by Starks Shrink

There is an ongoing trial in Florida, in which a woman is facing first-degree-murder charges for killing her two teenage children. At first blush, this seems a heinous crime. What kind of a mother could kill her own children in cold blood? However, it’s more complicated than that. What if the mother was ill? Really sick? Julie Schenecker is that mother and she fatally shot her 13-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter on January 27th of 2011. She is mounting an insanity defense.

Julie has a long history of mental illness and had been diagnosed with Bipolar I with psychotic features. The medications she was taking were a cocktail of prescriptions used to treat serious mental illness, which she apparently took erratically at best in the months prior to the killings. Julie had even been hospitalized for her illness for nine months at one point. Nine months is a long time to be hospitalized and away from one’s family, so a commitment of that magnitude potentially indicates refractory bipolar disorder. An Illness of this degree of seriousness is a huge strain on families and Julie’s return to her family probably changed its family dynamic considerably. Her bipolar disorder was also marked by long periods of major depression manifested by days and weeks in which she couldn’t get out of bed.

Based upon correspondence between Julie and her family, and her husband Parker’s emails to her psychiatrist, Julie’s real difficulties began in September of 2010, just months before she killed her children. She had been taking Abilify for her bipolar disorder, an off-label usage with dubious results concerning its efficacy for treatment of bipolar disorder. Her husband indicated that she was having severe tardive dyskinesia from the psychotropic medications and described her as suffering from constant involuntary movements of her mouth and tongue. Consider, for a moment, what it is like to live with this side effect, when you are already experiencing severe depression. Julie indicated that she had been prescribed Cogentin (which usually suppresses tardive dyskinesia) and that it had been effective for a short time. After this, Julie was unravelling and her doctor tried to stem the course of her deterioration by changing her medications. Forensic technicians found prescriptions for clonazapam, Lithium, buspirone, venlafaxine and trazolan amongst others in her home. I can’t comment on the choice of drugs, as I am not privy to her medication schedule or history. However, it’s clear that her psychiatrist was desperately seeking to find a combination of medications that would stabilize Julie Schenecker. As few as 6 days before the murders, Julie filled new prescriptions for anxiety and antidepressants that the scrips indicated would ramp her up to a therapeutic level. Sadly, she never attained that level.

Like many people suffering from psychiatric disorders, Julie turned to alcohol as a means of self-medicating. Her prescriptions weren’t assuaging her pain and, in fact, the added side effects were debilitating. When she had an automobile accident in November of 2010, her husband stepped in and sent her to an addiction rehabilitation facility. While it is doubtful that alcohol was Julie’s main problem, it was a symptom of a deteriorating mental state. Julie apparently agreed, since she wrote in her journal that she didn’t belong in a rehab environment but in a psychiatric facility. She returned to the family home early in December and then the real trouble began. Her children and her husband had had enough of her illness and weren’t shy about showing their displeasure to Julie or their extended family.

One feature of bipolar-related psychosis can be persecutory delusions. Julie displayed signs of this in her journal writings. A child says something unkind and the delusion heightens a simple adolescent comment to malice and hatred. Julie was a stay-at-home mother and wife, so when her husband and her children chastised her about her illness, she internalized those comments into feelings of complete failure and alienation from those closest to her. This was the onus of her ultimate deed. She felt shamed by her family and her self esteem deteriorated to the point that she saw no option other than death. Her family knew she was suicidal, but because she had expressed these thoughts so often, they discounted them. Julie even mentioned, in her police interview, that her psychiatrist had told her that she’d better “make it on the first try” in regard to suicide. I highly doubt that her doctor spoke to her in such a manner but I do think that Julie believed he had, which is another sign that she was very likely delusional.

In the week prior to the killings, Julie’s husband Parker was deployed overseas for a short temporary term of duty. However, before he departed, there was a flurry of emails between Parker and Julie’s parents and siblings in which Parker detailed his frustrations with Julie and with her illness. Julie apparently asked all of her family members for a copy of the email, but they refused and her brother actually sent his own lengthy email to Julie in which he added to her distress. I believe that Julie was trying to grapple with her illness; she filled prescriptions the day before she bought the gun that she used to fatally shoot her children. Her journal is full of her deluded ramblings, pages of how alone she felt interspersed with nonsensical scribblings that even she couldn’t understand. She did write that she had planned to take the lives of her children and her own life, but is this evidence of premeditation or simply further evidence of her dangerously deteriorated mental state?

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Those are the facts of the case. Now, I will proffer my opinions. What is painfully clear to me is that Julie’s own family really has very little understanding of what it means to have bipolar disorder and the public at large has even less. It has become almost a ‘popular’ affliction and people toss the word around as though it were simply mood swings, even self-identifying as “being bipolar”. People aren’t bipolar, they have bipolar disorder which can be every bit as serious as schizophrenia, though you don’t hear people claiming with pride that they have schizophrenia. Bipolar disorder, can present with psychosis (a complete break from reality). It can have features of cognitive impairment, delusions and paranoia accompanied by profound depression. It is debilitating, it is chronic and can be difficult to manage from a medical standpoint due to the cyclical nature of the illness. So when her family berates Julie for not trying hard enough, it displays a lack of comprehension, not a lack of compassion. I can’t blame Julie’s family. Bipolar disorder is the cause of many failed relationships; it’s exhausting and exasperating for the client and the family members. Anyone who has a family member with a mental illness needs to become educated about the illness along with the person who is diagnosed in order to stand the best chance of survival. However, I can and do blame the media for deciding that bipolar disorder is not a real mental illness and thus should not be a defense for Julie’s actions. They need to take the time to educate themselves on the disorder before standing on a soapbox to proclaim Julie is evil, rather than seeing her for the seriously ill woman that she is.

I also blame the judicial system. We have a system that has “Stand Your Ground” laws, in which a judge can decide whether or not a person was in fear for his life when he took the life of another, presumably because they want to spare the person the rigors of a trial, and because a judge is, in theory, most capable of determining the proper application of the law. However, in the case of the mentally ill, we force the accused to stand trial and prove to a jury that they are legally not responsible. How is a jury to determine the mental health of another person? How can we as a society expect 12 people to sit in a courtroom and decide whether someone has been properly diagnosed? I expect that this trial will pit psychiatric professionals against one another in a battle over Julie’s diagnosis and competency. Julie’s own husband, who lived with her for 20 years, couldn’t comprehend her illness but we will ask a room full of strangers to understand and decide her fate in a matter of days, based upon only what they hear in that courtroom. That is not justice; rather, it is a travesty of justice.