In October 2015, a 22-year-old youth was arrested in Madhya Pradesh for allegedly killing his father. The father-son duo allegedly had a heated argument in course of which the son lost his temper and stabbed his father who advised him to start earning before thinking about marriage. The father died on the spot while the son was later arrested by the police.
In yet another case on February 8th, 2020 a 33-year-old women techie murdered her mother 54 and stabbed her brother then incorrectly left after assuming him to be dead. The reason she had given for this was somewhere surrounding the debt in which they were trapped and how the daughter didn’t want the police to hound her family. Many such stories and cases like this have been common throughout but never highlighted.
This condition is known as Parricide i.e is the “homicide of one’s parents or another close relative in the family”. The parricide incidents tend to upset the ideas and the comfort that surrounds family, the conventional ideas about the intimacy and sanctity of a child-parent relationship. As per several studies, the majority of parricide offenders belong to four acute types that are – severely abused, mentally ill, dangerously anti-social and have a history of underlying anger due to the regular consumption of alcohol and drugs.
But let’s look for the reasons why children kill their parents, so in most cases, parricides show up as an outcome of intense and stringent relationships with parents. This conflicting relationship might be followed out by a history of a bitter childhood. Apart from this, the parricide that is driven out from adults is also paired with some chronic mental illness, especially in adult males there is a high probability of having schizophrenia while other disorders include psychotic and depressive disorder.
The adolescent cases involve more severe physical abuse by the parents wherein the abused child may take the matter in their hands either for self-protection or in order to express their anger for the mistreatment they got. It is fortunate to say that the crime rate is still really high, but parricide in India is not very common as research suggests it accounts for 1-4 % of homicides.
The theories of parricide range back into deep routed family theories where the primary cause is attributed to an abusive and pathological family structure, in the most severe cases, one parent may utilize an adolescent as an instrument for spouse murder.
Parricide is not easy to cure disorder as it not only stems from within the individual but also from the surroundings like the stringent family background, abusive childhood and lots of stuff. So the individual suffering from it is not the only one who needs therapy but the whole family or the people from where the problems are stemming from. To cure this, one might have to engage in medicinal therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy/counselling, psychoanalytic therapy where the focus would be solely on the intrapsychic dynamics and lastly what will work effectively here is family system therapies where the focus would be solely on the family dynamics with an aim to solve the problems. So this was all about Parricide, its causes and its cure.
