Psychiatric aspects of familicide.

Various types of killings occur within family matrices. The news media highlight the dramatic components, and even novels now use it as a theme. 1 However, a psychiatric understanding remains elusive. Not all killings within a family are familicidal. For want of a better term, I have called the killing of more than one member of a family by another family member "familicide." The destruction of the family unit appears to be the goal. Such behavior comes within the category of "mass murders" where a number of victims are killed in a short period of time by one person. However, in mass murders the victims are not exclusively family members. The case of one person committing a series of homicides over an extended period of time, such as months or years, also differs from familicide. The latter can result in the perpetrator getting killed or injured in the process, or subsequently attempting a suicidal act. However, neither injury, nor suicide, nor death of the perpetrator is an indispensable part of familicide. Fifteen different theories purport to explain physical violence within the nuclear family. 2 Varieties of killings within a family are subvarieties and familicide is yet a rarer event. Pedicide is the killing of a child by a parent. These are usually cases of one child being killed by one parent. If the child happens to be an infant, the act is infanticide. Many of the latter are situations where a mother kills her infant and is diagnosed schizophrenic or psychotic depressive. Child beating by a parent can result in inadvertent death. One sibling killing another is fratricide. A child killing a parent is parricide, or more specifically patricide or matricide. Uxoricide is one spouse killing another. Each of these behaviors has its own intrapsychic and interpersonal correlates. Such correlates often involve victimologic aspects. As a caveat, and based on this study, we should not assume that the perpetrators in familicide all bear one diagnosis even in a descriptive nosological sense. A distinction is needed between intra familial homicides related to psychiatric disturbance in one family member and collective types of violence in which families are destroyed. Extermination of families based on national, ethnic, racial or religious backgrounds are not