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[...]
”The killings are cruel inversions of nature where a father murders his entire family in an act called familicide. After the carnage, the question lingers: Why did they do it?
For decades, psychiatrists have been studying such cases to determine what mental issues trigger this behavior. A person who kills his family could have control issues that lead him to decide the fate of the children, spouse and pets, researchers said.
While mentally healthy people cannot make sense of killing someone they love, for people with mental illness, "it has to do with their distorted thinking and depression," said Donna Cohen, a professor and head of the Violence and Injury Prevention Program at the University of South Florida.
The person with a mental illness views his wife and children as possessions, believing, "I have to keep this. This is mine," Cohen said. "Nobody else is able to take care of them except me. If I can't control this in my life, I'll preserve it in death so that my world doesn't change. It's the psychiatric issues."
Murder-suicide plots could brew in a person's mind for months, even years. [...]
“They think they're saving their family and that they will be remembered with sympathy," Schlesinger said.
Those thoughts become action when a precipitating event, or trigger, occurs, such as divorce, suspected infidelity or loss of job.
While research shows that suicide rates rise when the economy is in trouble, it may not be true for murder-suicides. [...]
Case Western researchers found that more than three-fourths of the offenders in 30 murder-suicides in the Cleveland, Ohio, area had signs of mental illness. Half of the men had borderline personality disorders, which trigger significant mood upheavals, impulsiveness and feelings of worthlessness.
"We can't prevent all of them," Cohen said. "But it's essential that we begin to educate communities about signs of mental health problems and distress." Close family members and friends usually know of problems in the household prior to the murder-suicide.
"People don't get involved, even when they know there's threat in violence because they believe they don't think anything will happen," Cohen said. "It's essential to get to domestic violence safe houses and be much more proactive in understanding there are people who have problems."
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/05/19/murder.suicide.families/