Where is the line drawn between evil caused by mental illness and evil committed by truly evil people?

Question by Alicia Arol: Where is the line drawn between evil caused by mental illness and evil committed by truly evil people?

Why did this man murder his two five year old twin daughters?
I am sure that any of you who watched 20/20 on June 6, 2008 were as appalled as I was-saddened as I was by this senseless tragedy. But did all of you “get” the fact that this man was/is not evil? Hitler…Ted Bundy…These men (and too many others like them) were pure evil. This man who butchered his two twin daughters was remorseful, and he claims that his mental illness caused him to murder his children. This man did not claim his mental illness as a defense. He took full responsibility for his actions, and he was sentenced for first degree murder. But why did he butcher his children to begin with? While I was watching the program, I even asked myself why this man could not have just killed his own self, rather than brutally murdering his two innocent little girls? If mental illness can cause people to do such horrific things, then how is anybody safe? My mother developed Schizophrenia late in her life. She was 32 and I was 10. My mother had been becoming very deeply involved with God and Christianity when she just developed her illness “out of the blue”. She woke me up from a sound sleep and told me that God was going to kill her that night for being a bad person. After God did not “kill” my mother, I lived around my mother’s “madness” and dealt with it as best as a child can. My mother said and did weird things, but she never tried to harm me. In 1991 (after I graduated from college), I went to live with my mother and her mentally ill new husband. My mother had been fine for many years. She is one of the lucky ones. If my mother takes her medication, she is and acts perfectly normal. The problem was (when I was a child), my mother would constantly go off her medication. My mother’s new husband convinced her to do what she had not done in many years. He convinced her to stop taking her medication, but (because the medication was so built up in her system), nobody (not even I) knew that she had stopped taking her medication for a whole year that I lived with her and my stepfather. Eventually, I started noticing all the signs from when I was a child. One morning, I heard my mother talking crazy and threatening my stepfather. I wanted to creep down the stairs-grab my car keys-and get out of the house. But, my mother heard me, and she started chasing after me. I ran up the stairs and into my bedroom. I slammed my door and desperately pressed against it, while “something” outside kept pushing on the door and trying to get in. The thing outside that clawed on my door like an animal was not my sweet, loving mother. Years later, I asked my mother if she remembered what she had been thinking that morning when she had tried to harm me (for the first time ever during her illness)? She told me that the voices in her head that day had told her that I was an alien that needed to be “knocked out”. If my mother had managed to get into my room, and had tried to knock me out, she might have killed me or seriously damaged me, BUT IT WOULD HAVE NOT BEEN HER FAULT. (Can you imagine what horror she would have had to live with for the rest of her life-even though what happened would not have been her fault?) The man featured on the 20/20 special does not understand why he murdered his baby girls? What I don’t understand is this? He states that he turned his daughters over so that he would not have to look at their faces while he was stabbing them to death. If he was capable of thinking that way, then didn’t he have (somewhere inside of him) some type of “awareness” of the horror he was committing? Maybe those two little girls are in heaven (like their mother believes), but all I know is that their last moments on earth were filled with terror, and pain, and “knowing” that their own father was snuffing out their lives. My mother’s mental illness was not her fault. This man’s mental illness was not his fault. My mother did make the conscious choice to go off of her medication, and this man did choose to not tell anybody he was having obsessive thoughts about murdering his twin girls. But if my mother had accidentally killed me, and I had arrived on the other side (still conscious and not burning in hell), I would have still known that mental illness is not anybody’s fault. Evil people are not remorseful. The man who killed his twin girls has a picture of the two girls hanging in his jail cell, as a daily reminder to him of what he did. But, he will still never know WHY he did what he did, and neither do I?

****Maybe demonic entities are really walking the earth (as some Christians believe), and these entities get inside of “weak” people. If that is the case-then not one of us is safe.
Mental illness runs in my family. How do I know that I will not suddenly “go mad” and try to harm somebody I love? I know that you can’t give me any answers, because nobody has any answers or guarantees. I have been plagued by demons and chased by madness my whole life, but I never developed anything serious enough for me to be locked up in a mental institution like my mother was several different times since she developed her illness 30 years ago.

Best answer:

Answer by Linda!=)
there is no line!

bad = bad = bad.

people who harm people HARM people.

thizz what it is.

Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!