Filicide: Needing Psychiatrists' Attention

psychiatrists' attention on the crucial importance of the association between maternal filicide and their mental health, which is being still neglected and not extensively investigated by a nation-based medico-legal system. Maternal filicide is defined as child murder by the mother and is a multifaceted phenomenon with various causes (cultural background, economics , unwanted/unexpected pregnancy, child's mental or physical defects, e.t.c.) and different psychosocial factors such as mother's mental disorders. 1 According to the expert's review , filicidal mothers were found to have frequent depression, psychosis, prior mental health treatment, and suicidal thoughts. The maternal filicide are classified as altruistic, acutely psychotic , fatal maltreatment, unwanted, and spouse revenge ones. 2 When considering the situation in Asian and Western countries , the rate deems to be still increasing today, in fact it was reported that there have been more than 100 cases of maternal filicide since the end of 2005–2008 in Japan, although the proportion of Japanese ≤14 years has been steadily shrinking in the past decade. 3 Among such cases, most of mothers were considered to have mental disorders in a recent cohort study. 4 All filicide and filicide-suicide cases in England and Wales (1997–2006) were studied, 5 6,144 people were convicted of homicide , of which 5.6% (filicides n=297 and filicide-suicides n=45) cases were filicide-related events. According to the study, 5 the importance of assessment for mother's mental disorder was verified, in which mental illnesses in mothers were more often than fathers to have a history of mental disorder (66% vs. 27%) and symptoms at the time of the offence (53% vs. 23%), most often affective disorder. In addition, 85 cases of filicide were found from 1995 to 2000 in Turkey, in which approximately 50% of the parents were diagnosed with mental disorders. All 17 cases with filicide-suicide from 1998 to 2010 were reviewed and analyzed in Hong Kong, 6 in which the majority of parents (n=7/15) had history of psychiatric illness including postpartum depression. In Korea, the filicide appears to significantly increase over several decades for any reasons based on mass media reports, however, the exact and officially-approved statistical data are very incomplete due to the ignorance and negligence of government and society. However, the representative Korean fili-cide study was conducted by psychiatrists also shows the importance of mental disorders filicidal mothers. 7 In this study, 7 the complete legal and medical documents of 45 offenders who were …