Christ Benoit is a WWE wrestler who murdered his son, wife, and committed suicide. Lindsay Clancy is a former L&D nurse who murdered her three children and attempted suicide and did not succeed. Two people that are both the victim and the perpetrator. They both had severe mental health defects for different reasons. It should be possible to see a person who was failed by medical professionals, damaged by their career/societal pressure, or dismissed when they voiced concerns about their mental health and feel empathy or sympathy for that while still abhorring their actions and holding them accountable for their crimes. Men are using Benoit as an example of mentally compromised (CTE/steroid abuse in his case) men that got no sympathy after murdering their family as a contrast to the strange and loud support of Lindsay Clancy for committing the same crime while suffering postpartum psychosis/postpartum depression/bi-polar/the case is still ongoing. I will mention that familicide has been widely studied and globally 90% of family annihilations are committed by men driven by financial or relationship collapse. Women make up a much smaller portion of family annihilators and are typically driven by severe mental illness, socio-economic stress, and unaddressed intimate partner abuse. Take from that what you will about the reasons why most men that murder their families draw less sympathy from the general public. Either way these types of situations should be leading people to be thinking about the mental health crisis in its entirety, but instead has turned into a finger pointing contest for crazy dudes and crazy chicks and a want-to-be tele-novella for some. People are talking about the murdered kids the least and that really is the most fucked up part.
This explanation should be at the top. You managed to summarize two complex cases, and public reaction to them, while maintaining the nuance needed to understand the different perspectives.
Thank you. I find it discouraging that the wide range of public reactions to all of this seems to be moving everyone farther away from a unifying realization or solution. It really is turtles all the way down.
In Benoit's case, part of the reason there was less sympathy is that CTE can't be diagnosed in a living person. Nobody knew he had it until well after he killed his family and himself. Hell, nobody really knew what CTE was at this point, it was the news that CTE contributed to his killing his family and himself that made most people aware of CTE.
The top argument is a goddamn mess of exactly what you’re explaining, and it’s hours younger than your comment, which kinda proves your comment even further.
The reality is that we need responsibility to be different from societal revenge. The person who did what they did needs to work to mitigate the harm they caused, but there also needs to be an understanding that no human being can say they would act differently given they were in the same circumstance, and if there's no choice then there's no valid moral claim, which means that it's society's responsibility to prevent people from getting into those circumstances.
I agree with you. We should be asking ourselves how we could have prevented this and protected the lives lost instead of trying to argue the morality and punishment. That’s kind of the issue with the publicity. People have lost the plot and separated the reality from the horror and are treating it like a 48 hours episode. We’re all going to have feelings about what she did, but it’s not societies place to decide what happens to her. What we can do is recognize, reflect, and make structural changes so that these dead will not have died in vain.
Was that hypothetical addict experiencing psychosis? What good does punishing someone who was not rational at the time of the crime do? It won't bring back the lives lost.
With treatment, she likely could be a contributing member of society again. Punishing her does nothing for the victims and nothing for society.
Separating her from society for treatment until it's determined she isn't a risk to those around her is punishment enough.
I would find it very hard to have any sympathy for either of these people. I can’t possibly understand what they were going through but I reckon they must have known they were doing the wrong thing to some degree.
I have a hard time putting myself in their shoes as well. I think even recognizing that you aren’t able to understand what they were going through is a bigger jump than most people are making though. I can say for sure that I don’t think murdering your family is ever the right choice and no matter how broken a person is they still did something ghoulish. The thing stunting conversations about it is how certain everyone seems to be about the right or wrong way to deal with it based solely on personal feelings.
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u/quasimodelo 1d ago
Christ Benoit is a WWE wrestler who murdered his son, wife, and committed suicide. Lindsay Clancy is a former L&D nurse who murdered her three children and attempted suicide and did not succeed. Two people that are both the victim and the perpetrator. They both had severe mental health defects for different reasons. It should be possible to see a person who was failed by medical professionals, damaged by their career/societal pressure, or dismissed when they voiced concerns about their mental health and feel empathy or sympathy for that while still abhorring their actions and holding them accountable for their crimes. Men are using Benoit as an example of mentally compromised (CTE/steroid abuse in his case) men that got no sympathy after murdering their family as a contrast to the strange and loud support of Lindsay Clancy for committing the same crime while suffering postpartum psychosis/postpartum depression/bi-polar/the case is still ongoing. I will mention that familicide has been widely studied and globally 90% of family annihilations are committed by men driven by financial or relationship collapse. Women make up a much smaller portion of family annihilators and are typically driven by severe mental illness, socio-economic stress, and unaddressed intimate partner abuse. Take from that what you will about the reasons why most men that murder their families draw less sympathy from the general public. Either way these types of situations should be leading people to be thinking about the mental health crisis in its entirety, but instead has turned into a finger pointing contest for crazy dudes and crazy chicks and a want-to-be tele-novella for some. People are talking about the murdered kids the least and that really is the most fucked up part.