Filicide-Suicide (the deliberate act of a parent killing their own child or children while subsequently taking their own life) is usually an extremely unpredictable act; one that is not anticipated by reasonable minds and one that is committed by a mentally deluded individual.
Efforts to rationalize this tragic and outrageous behavior are often attempted by blaming someone else other than the perpetrator for the events that unfold; however, the blame virtually always belongs squarely on the shoulders of the individual who perpetrated the crime. There is simply no reasonable explanation for a father intentionally killing his own children because he is psychologically distraught by his own personal failures or due to the fact that other people in his life are less than accepting or empathetic to his disappointments.
There is also no reason for any person to expect that a father would murder his own children unless he showed outward signs of extreme psychosis. Such an act is the product of an unstable and confused mind and not the product of other people’s criticism of the perpetrator’s past mistakes preceding the commission of the crime. Quite simply, the blame for filicide-suicide lies with the person who committed the crime.
The principal reasons someone perpetrates such an act of violence have been classified into 4 major categories:
- A parent who is severely delusional who believes that they are performing an altruistic act (for example, saving their children from some imagined suffering);
- A parent that is acutely psychotic;
- A parent that commits unintentional filicide (were the parent is in a heat of anger and inadvertently kills the child) and;
- A parent who kills the child as an act of revenge against the spouse.
Obviously, altruistic filicide could be theoretically justified if there was a real and present threat that would otherwise cause the children to endure extraordinary suffering and subsequent death if the parent did not kill them to avoid this extraordinary suffering. However, this is not the circumstance in well over 99% of the cases of filicide-suicide.
Many of the parents who commit filicide that do not subsequently kill themselves, and parents who commit filicide that subsequently commit suicide (who leave notes of explanation for their deeds), attribute altruistic motives to their crimes. However, these attributions cannot be taken at face value because it is simply human nature to attempt to justify any act of impropriety.
