Depresión

Depresión is presented not as an established diagnosis but as a contested part of the evidence about Alice Espanet’s mental state. Alice described symptoms from her past, while clinicians disputed what those reports and her later condition could establish. The disagreement mattered in court, where the defense connected mental disturbance to criminal responsibility and the prosecution challenged the diagnosis; after the trial, treatment continued amid acknowledged uncertainty about recovery and relapse.

Symptoms and diagnostic limits

During the trial, the prosecutor distinguished between never having attended a psychiatrist’s office and having no history of mental distress. The Belgian psychiatrist said Alice herself had described clear symptoms of bulimia and depression in her past. The prosecutor answered that her account was not corroborated: there was no official diagnosis. The psychiatrist conceded that the earlier disorders were reported by Alice, but said they were consistent with his recent evaluations.

That exchange left a consequential gap between reported experience and documented clinical history. Alice’s account was not an official diagnosis, yet the psychiatrist did not regard the lack of one as dispositive. His assessment joined what Alice had said about her past to his more recent evaluations. The trial thus made the credibility and interpretation of personal testimony part of the psychiatric evidence, rather than relying on a prior formal diagnosis.

Depression also remained distinct from the defense’s more consequential claim of postpartum psychosis. Asked to clarify the basis for diagnosing Alice with that condition, the Belgian psychiatrist confirmed that he relied on her behavior and her account. He treated those as the available grounds for an assessment; the prosecutor’s question, by contrast, emphasized how much depended on evidence supplied by the accused herself. The jurors appeared receptive to the psychiatrist’s answer, with most nodding in agreement, apparently without intending to.

Conflicting psychiatric accounts at trial

After the Belgian psychiatrist left the stand, two psychiatrists who had examined Alice at the investigating judge’s request shortly after the events presented a contrary view. They had found no sign of postpartum psychosis and did not consider her depressed. Their disagreement was not only about diagnosis but also about timing: they said postpartum psychosis occurred in the weeks immediately after childbirth, whereas Alice’s twins were ten months old. To them, that interval raised suspicion about the diagnosis offered by the defense psychiatrist.

The two experts illustrated their account by describing other infanticide cases in which psychosis had been certified: a five-week-old baby killed with a carving knife in a town in Toledo, a mother who jumped from a balcony holding her three-month-old baby in Girona, and a ten-day-old baby found in a bathtub in Madrid. Carmela Basaguren objected that these examples did not address her client’s case. Their force in the courtroom came from contrast: the experts invoked cases they considered recognizably associated with psychosis, while arguing that Alice’s circumstances did not fit the same pattern.

The testimony left depression and postpartum psychosis neither interchangeable nor conclusively resolved. The Belgian psychiatrist saw Alice’s reported past symptoms as consistent with his recent assessments; the court-appointed experts reported no depression and no psychosis after their examinations. The record presented in the trial therefore contains a dispute among clinicians and a gap in prior documentation, not a settled account of Alice’s mental condition.

Care, treatment, and uncertainty after the deaths

Ritxi later acknowledged that he had seen enough cause for concern to seek help. The couple hired Mélanie to reduce the workload, brought a Reiki teacher to the house in an effort to ease Alice’s chronic sadness, and arranged Pilates classes twice a week. The general impression, he said, was that she was improving and that the situation was under control. In hindsight, those measures had not been enough, but the account does not establish that Ritxi understood the danger at the time.

After the deaths, accounts of Alice’s condition came chiefly from Ritxi and the Belgian psychiatrist who treated her. They described a life of withdrawal: Alice rarely left home, took strong medication, and was never alone, with a nurse watching her while Ritxi worked. She travelled frequently to Barcelona for appointments with the psychiatrist, making the journey from car to plane, taxi, consultation, and back in a single day. The psychiatrist said she was improving, but would need more therapy and medication; the risk of relapse would remain high. He advised against her having more children.

The narrator also marks the limits of this picture. The sources were interested parties, and what Alice did inside the house remained unknown. No private prosecutor pursued the children’s interests, and no private investigator tracked Alice’s conduct over time. The post-trial account can therefore describe the treatment and restrictions reported by her husband and psychiatrist, but cannot independently establish the full course of her recovery or everyday life.

From diagnosis to legal disposition

The defense’s legal argument was broader than depression alone. In seeking Alice’s release from pretrial detention, Carmela Basaguren cited Article 20.1 of the Spanish Criminal Code, which exempts a person from criminal responsibility when a psychological anomaly or disturbance prevents understanding the unlawfulness of an act or acting in accordance with that understanding. The prosecution opposed release, stressing the gravity of the two murder charges and the potential sentence. The judge nevertheless released Alice on bail, with her passport withdrawn and an obligation to report to court every fifteen days. The defense had already indicated that it would seek acquittal on the grounds of mental disturbance.

The eventual disposition continued to link psychiatric assessment and legal responsibility: following the jury’s decision, the judge substituted psychiatric treatment for imprisonment and chose outpatient care rather than admission to a psychiatric institution. A favorable view of that decision cited Alice’s stable economic circumstances, Ritxi’s commitment, and the prospect of institutional oversight. The interview also notes that Spain had only two prison psychiatric hospitals, in Alicante and Seville, and that admission would have seriously disrupted her family. The record raises the question of whether social position helped make outpatient treatment practicable, but the available exchange does not establish an answer.

The book places this case against a longer history in which law has treated a mother’s mental state around childbirth as relevant to the classification and punishment of infanticide. In Spain, infanticide remained distinct from homicide from 1822 until the 1995 Criminal Code abolished the category; proposed revisions had connected reduced punishment to emotional strain associated with childbirth and the puerperal state. Canada, by contrast, retained an infanticide provision for a mother who killed a child under one while affected by pregnancy, childbirth, or lactation, a law criticized as a surviving Victorian measure. These examples do not resolve Alice’s diagnosis. They show why the distinction between depression, postpartum psychosis, and other mental disturbance carried consequences beyond clinical description: it could shape how a mother’s act was understood and what punishment or treatment followed.