[Three cases of matricide]

The matricide is defined as the murder of the mother by her son or her daughter. The term of parricide is also used. Matricide is not a specific mental disease. The study of three original cases leads to classify two of them as psychiatric disorders, legal authority is applicable to the last. The first category contains a wide spectrum of psychiatric diagnosis and could be successfully controlled by treatment. Those cases fall in the article 64 of the French Law at the moment of the murder. The second category consists of perverse individuals responsible of their actions and hardly curable by treatment. These cases are abandoned to Justice. The "parricide" represents 2.54% of murders, the matricide 0.68%.