I drove to the hospital where Mary had been committed and was taken through a locked door to the psychiatric ward. Mary walked across the large lobby area to greet me. She was happy to see me, but seemed edgy; she was nervous about being touched or hugged. She had a ball about the size of a softball and she wanted to play catch with it. I suggested that instead we sit down at a table and talk. She agreed. We took seats across from each other and she proceeded to tell me what she'd been doing and thinking about for the last few days.

Here is part of what Mary believed that day with utter conviction: She was from a planet made entirely of metal (she asked me to remove my ring and wristwatch because of "the magnetism problem"). She could slip around in time and see things that were about to occur, moments before they took place. On the horizon she had seen the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb explosion. The U.S. Army was occupying her town; and she could only drink water that had been boiled "because of the radiation."

Mary's psychosis was short-lived -- about three weeks, and as psychoses go, her skewed perception of reality was not unusual. Many psychotics have even more extreme delusions, which can last years. John Nash comes to mind. So does Andrea Yates.

So how does a person demonstrating such extreme irrationality get by? In Yates' case, plodding through suicide attempts and breakdowns with few breaks in her stay-at-home mothering. Her husband, Russell, is often blamed for this, vilified as an unfeeling spouse who failed to deliver Andrea from a situation that was inflaming her illness. But I know, from experience, that we of ostensibly sound minds are poorly equipped when confronted with a broken one. Our first reactions are the usual: "This can't be," "This doesn't make sense," "Snap out of it," "Just calm down, everything is going to be OK." We deny, discount, gloss over, deflect, we try reason, in the wild hope that this person who we love, count on, need, will get better and not leave us.

In a way, you go through some of the same emotions you do during a car accident ("This isn't happening"), but extended over weeks and months. When the person going out of their mind is someone you love and depend on, such as Russell did Andrea, the need to believe that person will pull out of it, that they won't turn your world upside down, is overwhelming. Russell Yates made errors in judgment that will haunt him for the rest of his life, but his response to his wife's illness was -- to my experience -- absolutely ordinary and typical.

As we wait to hear whether Andrea Yates will be executed for her insanity, I wonder why she wasn't saved from herself, treated like a victim and allowed to get well, before the morning of June 20. Maybe now that we have seen (once again) the horror that comes from untreated psychosis, we will learn to deal with it humanely -- if only out of self-interest.

But for those who wish to see Yates die or wither away in prison, I'll say this: Part of what a person learns as they get close to psychosis and begin to understand the life of these tortured minds is that there is no punishment greater for the psychotic than psychosis. A death sentence for Andrea Yates will be as redundant as it is unjust: Yates' life, like her children's, is already over. A prison sentence is equally superfluous: In or out of a tiny cell, Yates was long ago sent to a prison more hellish than anything the state of Texas can build.

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