Customer Reviews

Are You There Alone?: The Unspeakable Crime of Andrea Yates

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Have you noticed how it is that when you mention the name "Andrea Yates" people's jaws go slack? Wait 'til you read this book. It is SO good. Not sensationalized at all. It doesn't have to be. The facts are sensational enough. The author, Suzanne O'Malley, has used interviews with Yates by various psychiatrists,interviews with her husband, mother and dozens of others as well as the court transcripts and letters from Andrea Yates herself to the author to tell the story. Apparently, O'Malley is the only reporter to have carried on a correspondence with Yates from her cell in prison. (Would love to read the entire letters and not just the exerpts in the book - wow!) What I like, is that the writer does not intrude on the subject - it tells itself seemingly effortlessly. Just every now and then, like one of the classic tragedies - which surely this is - she will very subtly point out something that is so ironic or just plain stupid that you have to laugh out loud. Thank goodness! Anyway, It's terrific.

The killing of her children was and is, of course unspeakable" but the depth of her understanding combined with the sensitivity of Yates's portrait makes this an extraordinary book. Read it. You won't be sorry. Truth is, after all, stranger than fiction.

When I first heard about Andrea Yates horrible crime I was living in Houston, and like most of my friends thought she was a cold blooded killer. I mean, it takes a while to drown five kids - how could she have done that? I figured at some point after the first or second you would have to comprehend what you were doing and STOP - how could she do all five? I am a mother (of only one, however) and I have been hospitalized for depression and bipolar and I know I couldn't do that to my child. But my illness was not nearly as severe as Mrs. Yates disease. This book dispels some of the rumors and puts Mrs. Yates into a more sympathetic light. Under Texas law, she knew that her acts were wrong, but, in her psychotic frame of mind, she beleived she was taking the best course of action available to her. This book makes a compelling argument for mental health care reform - if Mrs. Yates had received anything close to the kind of help she needed, her children would almost cetainly be alive today. If her problem had been physical rather than mental, her children would be alive and she would be a well woman. If anything, this book showed me that there are two sides to every coin, and that even though I myself have been the recipient of poor mental health care, it is still easy to blame the patient. This story has no clear cut right or wrong, but does show that health care in this country should be governed by the patients illness, not the amount of care their insurance will cover.

Psychology in general has always been interesting to me. I am getting my minor in Psychology currently. I was shocked and sad by the terrible, horrific story of the Yates children. This book was impossible to put down. I read the entire book in a day. The author does a wonderful job of telling the story and offering insights not all people are willing or capable of seeing. I definitely recommend this book to anyone who wants a better understanding of the case and the disturbing story. It does a wonderful job of making Mrs. Yates seem human and terribly, terribly let down by the psychological health system in the United States.

The sheer amount of detailed material Ms. O'Malley amassed is staggering enough. Add in her correlations, cross references, interlaced quotes and internal dialogs melded with incisive personality sketches and tied together with interviews and correspondence from scores of the large and small actors involved in this tragedy and the result is truly amazing.

She quotes chapter and verse, but never preaches. She examines questions of integrity, conscience and ethics, but never moralizes. She gives us the material to come to the same logical conclusions she has drawn - but never makes them for us.

Ms. O'Malley has painted horrific detail with humanity and compassion and managed to make us think deeply about such lightweight topics as mental health, the legal system, health care, mental medication, childcare, religion, family relationships and societal responsibilities while staying off the soapbox, eschewing histrionics and maintaining our interest - quite a feat.

Any psychiatrist reading this book must half hope to come upon evidence of some obvious malpractice, so as to be able to say "such a thing could never happen to one of my patients" rather than "there but for the grace of God go I."
Some of the professional errors O'Malley describes are defendable. Experts may reasonably differ, as did some of the experts she talked to, about whether the case was one of bipolar disorder or of schizophrenia. Treating a bipolar patient with anti-depressants alone is often stated to be undesirable because of the danger of precipitating mania, but the practice has its advocates. O'Malley does not make Dr Saeed sound like an empathetic character with good verbal skills but that may be a subjective judgment.
She skates over the decision by the Yates's to have a fifth child. Rusty Yates has been much criticized for this. Dr. Starbranch made a written note that a further pregnancy would guarantee another psychotic episode but we do not know what she said to Rusty Yates about it.
I cannot imagine tolerating the practices she describes at Devereux. Of course O'Malley's description is based on a a written record that may not have reflected all of what went on. The chart and treatment plan would normally have been reviewed by Magellan. In any inpatient facility I have known there would have been extended and worried discussions, involving social workers and nursing staff, about the fact that there were five small children at risk. On the other hand it is possible that even with such discussions the staff migh have been reassured by the fact that the husband was supportive and a grandmother was arriving who would be in the house while he was at work. (The killings took place between the time Rusty Yates left for work and the time Dora Yates was due to arrive in the morning.)
I do not feel qualified to cast the first stone.

This book will clear up a lot of things for people wo were/are interested in the Yates case. Much blame has been put on Rusty, her doctors, and her family. O'Malley has personally interviewed most parties involved and the picture that she paints is crystal clear: our mental health system is sorely lacking.

I believe that for those in the camp that think she should have gotten the death penalty, this book will change their minds. It is clear that Andrea Yates should be under psychiatric supervision for the rest of her life, not in jail.

Aside from a little skipping around that was confusing, O'Malley covers things chronologically, beginning with the drownings and ending with the uncertainty of the future for the Yateses. I was a bit taken aback when the author claimed that she "saved Andrea's life" herself, but apart from that, this book is excellent.

I stated that this was the best book written on the Yates case so far. It is, but bear in mind that is not saying a lot given the material that has been published so far. While O'Malley makes a strong case that Andrea Yates was suffering from severe mental illness and would have been better served by being sentenced to a mental hospital, I personally felt that Ms. O'Malley had become too personally attached to this case and some of the key players, esp. Rusty Yates. As a result, it is very difficult to wade through the author's bias and get a clear understanding of the events that lead up to this tragedy.

For instance, very little is said about the Yateses' decision to have a 5th child even after they had been warned by Andrea's doctor that such a decision would almost certainly "guarantee future psychotic depression." Furthermore, the author fails to point out the contradictions in Rusty (and Andrea's) philosophy to have as many children as "nature intended." (i.e, The couple lived together almost a year before they married and Andrea was on the pill during that time.) Also, Rusty claims that he is not a doctor and thought all psychiatrists were essentially the same, yet he also KNEW that Andrea's last doctor, Dr. Mohammad Saeed (who, IMO, became a scapegoat of sorts for both the Yates and the Kennedy families),should have given her the drug Haldol.

O'Malley never bothers to point these out, yet strangely enough, she takes it upon herself to inform the reader that when she met with Dr. Saeed for her first and only appointment, she noticed that his BWM "could have used a wash." It was comments like that which made me wonder just what Ms. O'Mallery was trying to accomplish in this book.

Lastly, I would have liked to hear more from the Kennedy family who since the trial, have levelled many criticism against their son-in-law and what they see as his inablity to acknowledge that his wife was as bad off as she was until it was too late.

I gave the book four stars because of the information packed into it, and the fact that it reveals a lot about the trial and how Andrea got screwed over by the prosecution (*a big part of the prosecution's case was based on an Law and Order episode that never existed--they said that Andrea watched this episode, about a mentally ill woman who kills her kids, and got ideas from it). However, it is boring and not a quick read at all. Suzy Spencer's "Breaking Point" is an easier read, but is not as thorough. This one gives more details as to how and why the kids were killed, while the other has a lot more on the previous life of the Yates' family. Both have their strong points.

Overall, I would probably recommend Breaking Point. Most of the 'extra' stuff this one provides can be found on CNN.

And, unfortunately, there are no pictures in this novel. Mary isn't even shown on the cover, so if you're relying solely on this novel, it's hard to picture her. She, and brothers Noah, John, Luke and Paul were beautiful children. This book could've been better had it included some pictures, simply to give the readers some illustration.

An intimate portrait of the disintegration of Andrea Yates leading up to the murder of her five children, if I had one complaint about this book it would be that it fails to take a long, hard and critical look at Rusty Yates.

Eloquently portraying Andrea's long history of mental illness, O'Malley gives the reader a tightly-written accounting of Andrea's continual mis-diagnoses and the disturbing tendency of her family to turn a blind eye to her obvious distress. Adding to the pressures of a diffident and immature spouse were religious fanatics who I sincerely hope are suffering some consequences for the things they said, saw and encouraged Andrea to do.

O'Malley obviously came to know the Yates family fairly well, Rusty in particular. While she does talk about some of his shortcomings, she loses her objectivity and fails to hold him as accountable as she does many of the other people involved, including Andrea's doctors and a medical system that was not equipped to manage her mental health care properly. Rusty is portrayed as a sort of bumbling victim himself, always trying to do the right thing but always falling short in an innocent way. A very large part of the book is dedicated to telling Andrea's story and describing what was happening around her at various stress points in her life, but in essentially choosing Rusty's side and perspective, O'Malley fails to capture any real emotional sense of Andrea's illness and its effect on her.

This isn't a lurid account of the crime itself, but more of a study of most of the people, behaviors and systemic failures that contributed to Andrea Yates' eventual collapse and the murder of her children. It's not an easy book to read, more because of its content than any problems with the writing itself. I encourage anyone seeking a rounder picture of the Yates' marriage to read this; the general media has never done such an in-depth look at all of the contributing factors.

Sadly for Andrea, the moderately hopeful note the book ends on, with her correct diagnosis and medication, has apparently not continued. As of a couple of weeks before this review was written, Rusty had filed for divorce and Andrea was hospitalized because she had stopped eating in prison, her mental illness reportedly uncontrolled again.

"Are You There Alone?" by Suzanne O'Malley could easily have been entitled "The Definitive History of the Andrea Yates Murders." The story is graphically written, fast paced, and comprehensive. O'Malley's descriptions of Andrea Yates, as well as her husband Rusty, and their five murdered children, although not exhaustive, is sufficient and skillfully written so as to immediately establish an intimate connection between the reader and the principals of the story. And overwhelmingly, it is a story of sadness and tragedy.

In several of the reviews, O'Malley has been criticized for seeming to empathize with both Andrea and Rusty Yates and the criticism, considering the totality of the circumstances surrounding the murders of the five children, is probably misplaced. It is hard to imagine that any reasonably thinking person could not help but to empathize with Andrea Yates, at least to some extent, for the extremely tormented person that she was. She was not some sort of diabolical psychopath hiding in the bushes seeking to strike out at some unsuspecting children as they walked down the street. She did not derive pleasure from the physical suffering of others. She did not achieve some sort of deranged excitement or sexual satisfaction as her children struggled for their lives. As the jury who convicted her of capital murder concluded, had it not been for Andrea Yates' mental illnesses, she would not have committed the crimes. And in telling the story, O'Malley rather than empathizing with her, leaves it up to the reader to reach their own moral judgments not only about Andrea Yates, but about all of the individuals involved in the story.

Throughout the book, O'Malley chronicles the crooked path that Andrea Yates, a college graduate and registered nurse, took on the road down mental illness. At various times she had been diagnosed as being bipolar, schizoaffective, schizophrenic, depressive, psychotic, bulimic, and experiencing postpartum psychosis. The manifestations ran the gamut of symptomatologies and she was described as being everything from catatonic, to delusional, to hallucinatory, to suicidal, to muted. After Andrea Yates' arrest, Melissa Ferguson, MD, the county Mental Health and Retardation Administration psychiatrist on call that night, deduced that "she was one of the sickest patients" that she had ever seen.

Indeed, as the story unfolded, two irrevocable elements were never in dispute: One, Andrea Yates had established a significant student-teacher relationship under the tutelage of a radical fundamentalist preacher which only exacerbated her constantly deteriorating psychological condition and two, she firmly believed that she had been a failure as a mother and that her five children were in mortal danger of eternal damnation if she did not act to ensure their salvation. Consequently, realizing that she would be spending the rest of her life in prison and truly believing that she had no other alternative, she killed her children in order to save them. She reasoned that her children being pure, would be ensured a place in Heaven, something that may not have happened if they reached adulthood and became more immersed in sin. Does that make any sense? No, of course not. But is it not worth considering? And if it is worth considering, perhaps the shortcomings of our society in how we view and treat mental illness is worth thinking about as well.

Andrea Yates was a profoundly sick person with an uninterrupted history of severe mental illness. Yet, she was repeatedly bounced between mental health professionals who, because of the sporadic nature of her treatments, reached all sorts of contradictory diagnoses and prescribed all sorts of drug therapies, some counteracting others. She was repeatedly hospitalized but when her insurance ran out, she was declared competent enough to be discharged in spite of the fact that continued hospitalization was warranted. In a very real sense, while Andrea Yates clearly let down her children, perhaps our mental healthcare system let Andrea Yates down. You don't think so? Perhaps you should think about the words of the Christian reformer John Bradford when he said, "There, but for the grace of God . . . "

In considering Andrea Yates' "insanity," O'Malley presented a short but extremely interesting history of the McNaughton Rule as it developed from English criminal law and was applied in the America courts. Thereafter, O'Malley analyzed the applicability of an insanity defense as Andrea Yates' attorneys formulated the legal strategy that they intended to pursue. This is a particularly provocative element of the story and leaves one to consider whether or not distinguishing psychological insanity from legal insanity is an anachronistic doctrine of law. Perhaps it is. Perhaps it is not. O'Malley leaves you to decide.

"Are You There Alone" is a compelling, fascinating, and gut wrenching read. O'Malley, irrespective of what others might have said, presented an objective history of the events surrounding the murders of the five Yates children. The book is about two hundred and fifty pages or so. Hopefully, if you read the book and reach the end, in closing the back cover you will do what I did and think about what you have just read. Really, "Are You There Alone" leaves you with little other choice. It is a story that will stay with you when you are finished.