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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
The children, when they were released and walked outside the house were obviously amazed by what they saw. They stopped to look at the snail and touch the grass, as if it was a precious thing.
They are now free.
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’.
The occupants never left the house and lived in a stench of garbage and excrement. As if still babies, the children slept in cribs, or on filthy mattresses on the floor with a sick kitten, wearing nappies.
There were almost no toys.
On the crib’s sides, there are disturbing graffiti: skulls, monsters and scratches. Psychologists will have to determine the psychological state of the children and any mental traumas they may still experience.
The parents are always in the spotlight.
The parents allegedly left Germany to move to Spain because they were denied the right to homeschool their kids in Germany.
They moved into a pink home in Fitoria in Asturias, a village with less than 200 residents, after being refused by the school and stating their intention to not send them there.
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.
Parents had given their children medication for ADHD, including air purifiers and bottled water. The shoes they wore had outgrown them years before.
No televisions, no electronic devices.
The mother put on masks for her children one after the other as soon as officers entered. She repeatedly said that the children were very ill.
They moved as COVID-19 began to sound. The fixation on the contagion may be caused by an obsession, a delusion, or a shared psychosis.
As of yet, there is little information about the parents. Expert reports will be needed to provide a more detailed profile. However, based on observed behavior, some hypotheses can already been made about certain psychological aspects.
The public first became aware of “Munchausen by Proxy” during the murder trial for Beverly Allitt, in 1993. It has now been brought to light again in the Lucy Letby Case.
This occurs when a person feigns or exaggerates illness and ailments to another individual, usually their own child, in order to gain control, attention, validation, and recognition.
It is possible to feel emotional satisfaction when you fulfill the role of caregiving.
In the Oviedo affair, the children were abused and mistreated by their mother, who insisted on them being very sick. She gave them non-prescribed medicine and, with the father’s help, imposed disproportionate and abusive control.
How then can two people come to an agreement on such a clearly wrong course of action?
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.
This is a subcategory within delusional disorders.
This occurs most often in the family or within close relationships as a result of a person who has a serious mental illness. The person who induces the other usually leads to shared delusions, which lead to social exclusion.
It is, however, a rare condition.
Parents and children were placed in pre-trial detention, without bail.
The judge has suspended parental rights and taken custody of the child. The judge has initiated proceedings for crimes such as domestic violence, abuse of children, abandonment and false imprisonment.
It will be interesting to see if parents argue that the guilt of their children is lessened because of their mental state.
