e officers a statement. The drownings touched a nerve across the country, finding both sympathy and rage. The Andrea Pia Yates Defense Fund has been established by other former PPD patients who understand her position. The medical records portray Yates as a woman with low self-esteem, few friends and little time to herself, all leading to her PPD.Yates was someone doctors described as: ''anxious,'' ''paranoid,'' ''suspicious,'' ''guarded'' and ''frightened.'' Yates' family traced her troubles to the postpartum depression that followed the birth of her fourth son, Luke, in February 1999. But the records reveal Yates' troubles started much earlier. She told psychiatrists the voices and visions began after the first child, Noah, was born in 1994. Yates said she ''blew them off,'' and the visions disappeared. But as Yates had more children and became more overwhelmed and depressed, the visions returned. Yates never described what she saw in the early visions. They became most disturbing in June 1999, when she told her doctors she saw at least 10 visions over several days. Unable to bear them any longer, Yates scratched at her throat with a steak knife in search of the carotid artery. Her husband grabbed it away and took her to the hospital. ''I had a fear I would hurt somebody,'' she explained to a psychiatrist then. ''I thought it better to end my own life and prevent it . . . There was a voice, then an image of the knife . . . I had a vision in my mind, get a knife, get a knife . . . I had a vision of this person being stabbed . . . the aftereffects.'' A few weeks before the steak knife episode, she ingested 40 to 50 pills of her father's Alzheimer's medicine. Afterward, in the hospital, she chastised herself for failing to kill herself. ''I'm a nurse. I should have known what kind of OD (overdose) to take,'' she said. The conditions in which her family lived may have contributed to her stress. In the months leading up to her suicide at...
