When I heard about the Queensland mother suspected (and confirmed) of killing her three children in a house fire today, I felt gripped in a way I can’t quite explain. My stomach turned. My mind resisted the details. And yet, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Not because I wanted to know the story – but because something in me already did.
It’s a horror so unbearable that the mind rushes to protect itself. Most people turn to outrage. Some to blame. We search for explanations because the alternative – that a mother could reach a point of such despair – is too threatening to the stories we hold about motherhood, and about ourselves.
But part of me knew right away that this wasn’t just a crime story. If the reports are true, it’s a tragedy that most likely began long before the fire. A tragedy shaped by isolation, silence, untreated mental health struggles, and the quiet erosion of a woman’s inner world.
As a therapist, and as someone who works closely with mothers, I see how thin the line can become when support is absent. I see how invisible suffering can go unnoticed – how often women say “I’m not coping,” only to be met with silence, minimisation, or an overwhelmed system.
It’s one of the last taboos: when a mother kills, people don’t just react with shock – they react with horror. Because mothers aren’t meant to break. They’re meant to nurture, no matter what. But that myth is part of the problem. It traps women in impossible expectations and leaves them alone when they most need holding.
This isn’t about removing responsibility. But it is about facing the full context. Many of the women who reach these breaking points are not monsters – they are unwell. Many are in the grip of postpartum psychosis, deep depression, unaddressed and overwhelmingly complex mental health conditions. Many have complex trauma histories. Many have asked for help and fallen through the cracks.
We want to believe that love is enough to carry a mother through the darkest nights. But love doesn’t replace sleep, hormones, identity loss, financial stress, or the deep wounds of not being seen. Love isn’t a substitute for structural support. Let alone the labour of working through trauma.
It’s easier to ask, “How could she do this?” than to ask, “How did no one see how much she was carrying?”
Until we can hold space for the complexities of maternal mental health – without jumping to shame or panic – we will keep failing the very women we expect to hold everyone else together.
This isn’t about denying accountability. It’s about waking up. Because tragedies like this are never just one woman’s story. They are warnings – about a system that leaves mothers last, and sometimes, too late.
Aleksandra Staneva, PhD - Internal Family Systems & Jung 