A glance at the literature on infanticide: filicide due to mental illness

A bibliography of infanticide amounting to 3674 articles, books and theses was searched for case descriptions of filicide: 1050 had sufficient information to make a diagnosis: in 417 the death of the child was due to some form of abuse and 633 to some form of mental illness. This paper considers those due to mental illness under the headings of depression (306 cases), psychosis (119), vengeance (113), mercy-killing (49), alcoholism and drugs (31), epilepsy (10) and sleep disorders (5). The material was divided into 37 tables in the search for high-risk groups. There were approximately equal numbers published before (289) and after 1950 (344). Mothers exceeded fathers in all categories except alcoholism and family annihilation. Compared with abusive filicide, that due to mental illness more often results in multiple child deaths, but these are contemporaneous not serial filicides. Vengeance and family annihilation were more common in recent publications, while there were more suicide pacts, and cases of mercy killing due to extreme poverty, and of filicide linked to epilepsy and sleep disorders, in the early literature. This evidence from case reports suggests that depression with delusions or command hallucinations, and mental illness associated with childbearing (psychosis and depression, often with psychotic features) may be relatively dangerous. Mother-infant (perinatal) psychiatric services may contribute to the prevention of filicide.