Michael Coy
WE can’t avoid the question – what was going through their heads?
WE can’t avoid the question – what was going through their heads?
A couple – a German man and American woman – based in Oviedo in the north of Spain, are the two most hated individuals in the country today.
For four years, they have been ‘imprisoning’ their three children – a boy of 10 and two girls – eight-year-old twins – in the so-called ‘House of Horrors’.
READ MORE: Inside Spain’s ‘house of horrors’ where three children were kept prisoner since 2021
When the children were liberated and walked out of the house, they were clearly amazed by the outside world. Breathing as if fresh air was something precious, they stopped to touch the grass and gaze at a snail.
Their four years of suffering were over.
The children were rescued from the house in Fitoria, a tiny rural suburb on the northern edge of Oviedo, from the ‘custody’ of their parents.
Christian S (their father) (53) and 48-year-old Melissa AS had kept the children as virtual prisoners in a house interior which the police describe as ‘highly unhygienic’.
They lived there, never leaving the house, amidst excrement and garbage bags. In nappies, as if they were still babies, they slept in cribs or on a filthy mattress on the floor, sharing space with a sick cat.
They had practically no toys.
Disconcerting graffiti has been found on the sides of the crib: scratches, monsters, skulls. Now it will be the job of psychologists to decipher the state of these children, and the mental traumas that may yet surface.
All eyes are on the parents.
They allegedly moved to Spain after being denied the opportunity to homeschool their children in Germany.
Faced with this refusal, and their firm intention not to send them to school, perhaps out of fear of action by social services, they moved to a pink house in Fitoria, a village of no more than 200 inhabitants in Asturias.
No one suspected anything – except, that is, for a neighbour who alerted the authorities because she had heard children’s voices and feared something might be wrong.
The house was filled with air purifiers, bottled water, and medication the parents gave their children for alleged ADHD. Their shoes had been outgrown years earlier.
There was no television, there were no electronic devices.
When the officers entered the home, the mother rushed to put masks on her children, one on top of the other. She kept repeating that they were very sick.
They had moved just as the COVID-19 alarm was rising. This fixation on contagion, among other reasons, might be a sign of an obsession, delusion, or shared psychosis.
So far, little has emerged about the parents, and a clear profile will have to wait for expert reports, but based on the observed behaviour, hypotheses about some psychological aspects can already be formulated.
“Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy” first came to the public’s attention during the murder trial of Beverly Allitt in 1993 and has arisen again in the Lucy Letby case.
It occurs when an individual feigns, exaggerates, or provokes illnesses and ailments in another person, often their own children, to gain control, recognition, attention, and validation.
Emotional gratification is derived from fulfilling the necessary caregiving role.
In the Oviedo matter, the children’s mother insisted they were very sick, gave them unprescribed medication, and, along with the father, exerted abusive and disproportionate control over them.
But how can two people agree on a course of behaviour which is so obviously misguided?
Shared psychotic disorder (formerly known as folie à deux) refers to symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations, disorganised thinking and speech, among other symptoms, shared by two individuals.
It is a subcategory of delusional disorder.
It usually occurs within the family or among close relationships, often as a response to a person with an established mental illness. One person induces the other to the point of achieving shared delusions that generally lead to social isolation.
However, it is a very rare condition.
The parents are being held in pretrial detention without bail, and the children are being cared for in a juvenile centre.
The judge has ordered the suspension of parental rights and has assumed custody of the children. Proceedings for possible crimes of domestic violence, habitual psychological abuse, child abandonment, and false imprisonment have been initiated.
It remains to be seen if the parents try to argue that their guilt is diminished because of their psychological state.
