I’ve watched the coverage of this case the same way most of us have. Clips from the courtroom keep looping across television, podcasts, and every social feed. A mother killed her three children. The hearings are broken into bite-sized moments for public consumption. And in the middle of it all sits a long parade of physicians from every specialty, plus the usual lineup of forensic psychologists and psychiatrists, each one questioned about what they saw, what they missed, and how they judged this woman’s state of mind.
The reactions online and in the press are predictable. Some people dismiss the experts entirely. Others treat every opinion as gospel, as if a few years of specialized training can decode the entire story and hand the jury a clean scientific answer. The conclusions people draw swing from wild historical comparisons to the Salem witch trials all the way to strained attempts to find some larger cultural excuse. What gets lost is the simpler and more uncomfortable truth.
The terms we use every day in psychiatry (psychosis, bipolar disorder, the rest of them) are rough approximations. They describe patterns of behavior and experience that come with widely different levels of insight, judgment, and real-world responsibility. They are not precise instruments. Many thoughtful people have spent their careers pointing this out. The whole idea of “mental illness” covers so much ground that it ends up including almost any human experience that feels uncomfortable or disruptive. When you sit with patients day after day, you see how much depends on the specific moment: the state of the brain, metabolic problems, life history, and everything else that shapes a person’s choices at that particular time. There is no final authority who can settle these questions once and for all.
I have practiced long enough to know that years of forensic training do not automatically make someone a better guide than basic legal common sense. The work still comes down to balancing individual rights against public safety and the need for accountability. I have also seen people in the middle of a complete break with reality who still managed to make some moral choices correctly. I have seen the opposite too: people who look intact on the surface yet make catastrophic decisions. Both are real.
This case will stay with the next generation of lawyers and physicians for a long time. It forces a hard question: Why spend decades trying to ease suffering when a single note written at one point in time can later be pulled apart and used against you while you were simply trying to apply what you knew to help someone in pain? The answer, for me, is that we still have to try. But we would do better if we stopped collapsing everything under the same heading of “mental illness.” Severe brain conditions that produce lifelong psychosis, relentless hallucinations, and delusional thinking are not the same as ordinary situational anxiety or the everyday struggles most people face. Treating them as if they belong in one big category confuses the public and weakens the care we can offer the people who need it most.
In the end, the myth is not that severe mental disturbance exists. The myth is that our current labels and expert opinions can turn questions of responsibility into purely medical ones. They cannot. The hard work of deciding what is fair, what is safe, and what is true remains a human judgment.
Farid Sabet-Sharghi is a psychiatrist.
