Posted on 05/29/2002 12:24:21 PM PDT by KimaraChan
Janice Taylor, who stabbed her 4-year-old son two dozen times outside their Lake Ariel home in 2000, is suing her doctors for not adequately responding to her psychosis as she neared the end of a pregnancy.
Mrs. Taylor and her husband, Brian, are suing the psychiatrists and obstetricians who treated her in the months before she exploded in violence that left her son, Zachary, with two punctured lungs, a severed jugular vein and scalp wounds on July 14, 2000, the complaint said.
The psychiatrists are associated with Community Medical Center and Scranton Counseling Center; the obstetricians are primarily with Physicians Health Alliance Inc.
The woman, who told neighbors that Zachary was the "Antichrist," then took an overdose of medicine and stabbed herself in the abdomen, but did not harm her baby. She gave birth to a girl about seven hours after the attack.
Zachary survived, but Mrs. Taylor was charged with attempted murder and other crimes. Wayne County Judge Robert Conway declared her not guilty by reason of insanity earlier this year after receiving three reports that reached that conclusion.
Spokeswomen for both entities declined to comment Tuesday because they had not yet seen the lawsuit.
Mrs. Taylor now lives in Wilkes-Barre; her husband resides with the children at the family home at 1038 Tresslarville Road, Lake Ariel. They are not living together because of a court ruling limiting her contact with their four children.
The Lackawanna County lawsuit, filed by attorneys James and David Colleran, details the Taylors' battle to preserve Mrs. Taylor's sanity at a time when her psychiatric medicine was first eliminated and then restricted to small doses because of her pregnancy.
They accuse the doctors and their employers of not adequately responding as she became more psychotic, delusional and depressed as the end of her pregnancy neared.
The complaint stresses Mrs. Taylor developed similar symptoms when she was pregnant in 1995, but the psychiatrist she was seeing then prescribed a high dose of Thorazine, an anti-psychotic medication, without any harm to Zachary.
The complaint charges some of the doctors with "improperly concluding (Mrs. Taylor) could not take higher doses and/or other psychotropic medications because of her pregnancy."
Pregnant women have been discouraged in recent years from using a number of substances, including some medicines, alcohol and tobacco, because of the danger of birth defects.
Mrs. Taylor was the mother of two in 1988 when she began to experience psychiatric symptoms. During the next six years, she was hospitalized four times and received outpatient therapy. The complaint said the hospitalizations happened after her medications were stopped. She had Zachary and continued taking medication and receiving outpatient counseling.
On Dec. 15, 1999, during a regular visit to the Scranton Counseling Center, she told Dr. Peter Moskel, her psychiatrist, that she thought she was pregnant. Almost a month later, the complaint says, the doctor told her to quit all her medications because a test showed she was expecting.
Mrs. Taylor's psychiatric symptoms returned in June 2000, the lawsuit says. She was involuntarily committed to CMC on June 10. Dr. Muhammed Rahman, another psychiatrist, consulted with Dr. Catherine Smith, an obstetrician associated with CMC. Mrs. Taylor was started on a small dose of one of her medications.
Mrs. Taylor was discharged on June 16, 2000, the suit says. Her next session at SCC was June 27. She was then switched to low dosages of Thorazine. She was not scheduled to come back until July 11.
In the interim, Mrs. Taylor missed a series of appointments with her obstetricians and behaved erratically when she did appear, but there was no contact between them and the psychiatrists so her medication was not adjusted, the complaint says. She missed the July 11 counseling session but still nothing was done, it says.
His mother's subsequent suicide attempt was disclosed in the lawsuit, not in the initial police reports.
Did not harm her what???
Stabbed herself in the abdomen, but did not harm her what, did you say???
Amazing how this little one's ethical status could be changed, with a simple change of subject matter. Were this a story on "Abortion Rights", the little one would be fortunate to earn the name "fetus" -- if not "fetal tissue" or "product of pregnancy".
But, since it is a story about child abuse, in which titillating readers about the danger to the little one's health will sell papers, I guess it's okay to call it a "baby".
Sounds like this woman is not healthy enough to consider getting pregnant.
Just another case of someone not taking responsibility for their own actions. If you get angry and loose control, you can just take some pills - don't worry about learning self control - the drugs will do it for you....
I am so sick of it....
Exactly. The mother is psychotic and thinks her 4-year-old son is the "Antichrist," but what's the difference between that notion and the abortion notion that a baby's ontological status is really nothing but a contingent, dependent variable of another person's value judgment? Isn't the latter just as morally and cognitively schizophrenic as the former?
Cordially,
Cordially,
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