S6, AFTERSHOW: The Girl Who Melted w/ Dr. Kirk Honda

0:06 Side contains descriptions of violence and sexuality. Listener discretion is advised. Just got off a call with doctor Kirk Conda of the Psychology and Seattle podcast, So excited to share it with you guys. Who was an absolutely intriguing talk and a personal delight of mind to be able to talk with him, because I started, you know, listening to doctor Kirk Conda a few years back when he was and he might still do this breakdowns of ninety day Fiance and those type of reality shows and kind of analyzing the motives behind people on the show, and I just found it fascinating. I think he has a very sharp mind. And as you guys know, I know a lot about true crime.

1:15 I know how to tell true crime stories, or at least I think I do decently. But I'm not a psychologist. I remind you guys a lot. I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a lawyer. So I have to bring these people in to help help us better understand these cases, or I try to. Here's the episode. Please go check out his show. It's called Psychology in Seattle. Listen to it on YouTube, or you can subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, any platform a podcast is on. Thank you for being with us, doctor Kirk Conda. And should I call you Kirk or doctor Honda, whatever you want to I'm open to anything. I don't usually notice what people call me, honestly. Okay, cool, all right, thanks for being with us, doctor Honda. He's the host of a phenomenal podcast called Psychology in Seattle. He is a doctorate in psychology, a masters in Marriage and Family therapy, and has been working in psychotherapy since nineteen ninety six and a professor since nineteen ninety eight. His podcast covers serious discussions of depression, anxiety all the way to lighthearted stuff such as analyzing reality shows and even YouTube apologies. Go check him out on YouTube and all podcast platforms. Just search Psychology in Seattle. Thank you so much for being here with us. How's your day going good? It's sunny here in Seattle,

2:46 which isn't usually the case, as everyone understands, so I'm in a good mood. All right. Well, thank you for joining us. And could you just tell us a little bit about why you started a psychology podcast. Yeah, so it was two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight, and I was listening to a lot of podcasts myself, and at the time it was the initial foray into podcasting by some people. There were very few podcasts, but of the podcasts that were out there about science and psychology, I just loved them. I loved the intimate nature. I loved the fact that they weren't tied to any major corporation. They were long form, they were conversational, the you know, the person who was doing the podcast could kind of do whatever they wanted to. They just follow their own nose in terms of what they wanted to create and how they wanted to impart information, and so I was just obsessed with it. I loved it. And then I thought maybe I could start a podcast. And I thought, well, even if I'm the worst podcast around in the English speaking world, there's only three other psychology podcasts, so even I found the worst, I would be the fourth best in the world. And have been loving it ever since.

4:12 Now, in the past few years, I've become a full time podcaster or YouTuber, no longer teaching full time or practicing full time a very small practice, very small practice these days, and also I teach at the university in a limited fashion. Awesome, had you heard of this case? The Lacy Fletcher case before. No, so let me just run down the basic facts of the case and then kind of get your take. I mean, the biggest mystery for me, we'll get to in the end, is the psychological motivation behind what happened the cases from Slaughter, Louisiana, small town a thousand people, about thirty minutes north of Baton Rouge. This fan of three, the mother Sheila Fletcher, calls the police one night at two thirty in the morning, says that her daughter is not breathing and she needs police to come.

5:12 Medical to come. They try to ask her questions, she just says, it's a long story. They show up and kind of the way this case has been covered in the news is the girl who melted and this well, she wasn't a girl anymore. She was thirty six years old and her parents had basically kept her on this couch in their living room and she just disintegrated into the couch over a period of five to ten years. I mean, a couple working theories. One of the theories I have is that they said that she started refusing, didn't want to leave the house, and then she just wanted to sit on the couch all day. The dad said he brought a toilet into the living room because she didn't want to go to the toilet, but she got to a point where she didn't want it. This is according to the parents, so we don't know how true this is.

6:03 They claimed she didn't want to even get up to use the toilet, so she started defecating in the couch or on a towel and they would clean it up, and maybe they kind of like the shame and guilt maybe started having them resent her, so maybe they accelerated the abuse. How does that land with you or what's your take on everything? Yeah, I was thinking someone something in a similar van. Of course, we can't know. The range of possibilities are broad. It could literally be the initial knee jerk interpretation I think most people would have, which is that the parents were abusive and horrific, sadistic, psychopathic, They didn't care about their daughter. They left her that they forced her to be there, or they beat her into submission if she ever stood up, or they might have literally even chained her to the couch and she was just left there to rot. And they were horrible, horrible human beings. So that's still possible, we can't know. Or on the other side of the spectrum, you have the individual, the individual that died that she was the main factor that contributed to this situation. You're presenting something I think sort of in the middle, which I would be prone to pursue as an hypothesis if I were involved, which is that you could imagine

7:35 And if you've ever had a kid with autism, or you've been around kids with moderate to severe autism, it can be challenging as a parent. There's a lot of issues that if you don't know, if you haven't seen it, you don't work with these folks, you might think, well, it's an autism, just like you're a little quirky, and yeah, that's why we call it a spectrum just or but you know, with moderate to severe autism, it can be extremely difficult to handle. I mean I used to work with occasionally in my early career with people with autism, and there was an individual. He was a teenager and he didn't talk really at all.

8:22 Every once in a while he would use a couple of words. So it's really hard to just imagine how you have a kid, a fifteen year old and you're trying to get his needs met. He's trying to community, you're trying to get his needs met, and you basically have to take guesses as to what's going on. He would get violent with me at times if I didn't do what he wanted me to do. I was just a worker, and he clocked me just full on in the face, blindsided me. And it didn't I didn't. I wasn't permanently injured or anything. It was just it was very shocking to me because I didn't I didn't even know he was upset, you know. And so I don't want to paint people with autism is violent, because of course that is not a scientific association. But the point is is that it's very hard. It can there's a lot of challenges.

9:09 So you could imagine that you have a family, as you said, that are ashamed and they don't have a connection. The thing that would have solved this is if there was a robust support system around this family, if there was a system in place, or the family, uh, you know, availed themselves of the system. Because it could be either it could be either there was a system available and the parents just didn't involve themselves, or the support in that area was so poor that they might have even asked for help and no one showed up, which happens all the time. The funding for these programs is varied and always underfunding. There's a there's not there's there's not enough tax dollars being allocated to this sort of thing, and there are people who just drift into the background like this, less severe cases than this, but today, currently in the United States, the most richest economy country that's ever existed, there are people who aren't you know, their households, who are suffering and situations like this, and they're asking desperately for someone to come help them, and there's just no one available. So it's a tragedy.

10:24 It's it's a it's an anti disability issue, it's an anti autism issue, it's anti reality issue, it's an anti tax program issue. So you know, that's my position on that. It's an obvious one once you understand it. But so it's possible that for whatever reason, they didn't have that connection. Maybe if we knew more, the parents were given plenty of opportunity to avail themselves. Maybe they were justly trying. Either way, you the kid starts having troubles in school. We don't really know the details. That's a little odd to me that you would start homeschooling a kid at fifteen, because usually as if the kids already in school, then things must be going at least well enough. But let me jump in because there's a detail I forgot, which is the school she was going to was a private Christian school and for whatever reason, it ended at ninth grade, and so she would have had to enroll in a new program. And that's when the parents decide.

11:33 I mean, it's still here's points still stands, but it wasn't. It wasn't like she was about to go into the next grade. Yeah, that that does add a detail there, because that would be difficult for any parent in a situation. It's like, well, how do we find a school that will accommodate? How do we find a school that she'll go to? What would be another possibility that you know, she might they might have tried to set her up. And you know, I don't want to make it seem like the parents are these wonderful people. We don't know that guy, Like I said, they could just they could be awful in a variety of different ways to different degrees. But it's possible that there was some kind of barrier there and then they're like, well, I guess we'll ad school again. I'm just telling a story that is possible amongst us. They the kid starts to have issues, she might have started to develop some sort of other mental illness, you know, seemingly maybe anxiety about Some people can develop OCD or compulsions around that could lead them to wanting to sit in a one in one place the fact that she because people don't. The thing is is, regardless of autism, no one wants to sit in a pool of their own crap and urine. No one wants to do that. It's not something that people like. So when I hear that, I hear either they were being abused and forced to be that way, or there was some mental issue that was a greater consequence then taking care of herself in that way. Right,

13:07 So if it wasn't abuse, which we can't know, then it could have been some sort of compulsion around. You know, I haven't seen this specific obsession, but I could imagine happening where someone is literally literally like if I get up from this couch, I will die, or the germs are going to get me or I mean, it could have even been some form of psychosis. And the issue again with autism, with some people, they could be suffering from something like this because they can be you know, they can't coexist within the same person, and it might be really hard to communicate with them. You might not know why they're not getting up from the couch, and they don't have the ability or their trust or the safety to be able to tell you why, what what's happening for them. And then there's no there's no recourse and the parents maybe there's some frustration there, maybe there's some abuse there, I don't know. And then like cooking a you know, raising the temperature on a frog in a in a you know, pool a pot of water, which is a myth by the way, frogs do jump out eventually, but the family just we see the end literally twenty years later, how bad it got. But you can imagine, day by day by day, these little changes, you know, you can imagine the first time that again I'm just telling a story, someone knows, but the first time that there's defication on the couch that the parents are like, oh no, no, you know, you can't do that. And so they're trying to deal with it. Maybe they have some success for a couple of years,

14:39 but over time it's it just starts to get You get more and more used to it, and then they're just like, look, you're a grown woman. Now you're twenty two, and you're still doing this. This is on you. And then maybe they try that, you know, for a while of just like, well, we gotta maybe if she lives in her own crowd, so'll eventually clean it up. And then you just get used to you know, fast forward, and then you get what you get. But like I said, if the parents had just had someone, even just if it was one social worker come to the house once a month, I'm guessing that this whole thing would have been solved because there are ways of helping people with autism along these lines. It's it's not it's not hard. When you have specialists and experts in this area, they know exactly how to proceed.

15:31 You know, there can be bumps in the road, but you work with the individual, you work with the family. You show up and you talk to him, it's like, hey, how's it going, And maybe you play a game the first couple of sessions, and then over the time goes on that they start to like you and you start asking questions of just like, so, what's going on with the couch here? You like, you know, and you know, you just slowly maybe over a few years, maybe there's some medication involved, maybe there's some other kind of treatment involved, or who knows, but there's nothing. I find it highly unlikely that this individual either chose to live this life like I want to sit on this couch and have this situation. I also find it highly unlikely the parents set out to do this, you know what I mean. But as you said, medical neglect, and it's here just hearing the details, it's pretty likely that even given the story that I told you, that criminal medical neglect is allegation, because even with everything I just said, like, you know, it's challenging Dadada at some point, you know, you live in modern America.

16:44 There are hotlines, there's the Internet, there are services, even if it requires you to maybe get a little upset and say, hey, you know, someone needs to help me with it, like they should have done something at some point, Like it doesn't take a genius to understand like this is an untenable situation and a danger to this to this individual and we you know, I don't know about the state therein, but in my state, there are laws against caretakers of dependent adults. Even though they're adults. You can be charged with neglect or abuse just on the basis of not tending to their medical needs because you know they're dependent on you. So it doesn't agate their responsibility or their crime, but it might not fit the stereotypical story of parents who were statistically changing someone to a couch. And yeah, that's what I My kind of instinct was as I looked into it more and more, was it didn't seem like your classic case of that or even hoarding disorder.

17:51 I've seen a lot of really grotesque neglect cases with people who were hoarding. But this house supposedly was lean. And the other thing that didn't fit was it wasn't it didn't seem like a child who was a total disappointment and was like locked in the basement because she was just in the living room, like it seemed like they would have secluded her more where they wouldn't have to see her every day. Locked in syndrome is a rumor that I heard repeated on a couple of news sites. And I looked into that and I found that the coroner said it definitely wasn't locked in syndrome. He didn't put that in the report, and he doesn't even know what locked in syndrome is. It's not a medical term. That kind of well, yeah, I mean, well, I think what people are referring to is when people have within normal limits mental capacity but they can't communicate. They are perhaps paralyzed, they've had a stroke and the injury is to such a degree that there's there's no ability to communicate, or you know, they're famous cases where the only way they can communicate is to blink their eyes, so they learn how to use Morris code or something. And if you didn't know better, you might think that the person is in a compromise vegetative state. Their mental capacity isn't there at

19:22 all, because they're not responsive. You are screaming in their face and they just don't blink and eye. Really, so, I think that's what they're referring to, and there's no reason to believe that that was the case. It's a pretty rare situation. And I mean, was there any indication of that from the parents. I mean that that's the problem as you were indicating earlier, is the only account we have is from the parents. There's no side individual that put eyes on this kid for twenty years, so you have to just hear their story. And I said that she was not in that state. But they also claimed that she was of sound mind to make her own decisions, and that's the reason that they ended up not getting her help.

20:10 They called a doctor once about five years before she died, and the doctor said, yeah, you need to probably take her in. Its probably when it was starting to get pretty bad. And this is again just a guess by on my half. They said they asked her, she said she didn't want to go. They said, okay, you can make your own decisions. You're an adult. And then they said they decided not to. Yeah, but it's strange she hadn't seen a doctor even for a basic checkup in nineteen years, which I mean, it's just kind of strange that she wouldn't go for a physical or dental or anything. Well, again, more evidence that there was something going on with her mental illness wise completely separate from autism, that was resulting in her not wanting to leave the house and also not wanting to leave the copchule hard to know. It is a tick in there. If they could corroborate that call to the doctor, if there's records of that, then there is one record of one call. Yeah, so that is helpful to them. But again, any rational parent of a special needs kids would know that you've got to do so much more. You can't just wipe your hands. And while I asked them, you know, and they said they refused, So moving on now, could they have possibly tried to call other services and they just ran into dead ends? I mean I could see that happening. It doesn't Again, I don't think any rational parent

21:45 would act this way. You know, at least once a week they would throw their hands up and be like, we have to do with the something. I mean, you know they would I don't know, just start pickting outside of the capital to be like, we have a kid at home and we need you know, parents, most parents, even they're not so great parents, would have done something like adequory. What do you think it was? Do you think they had a serious mental illness? So I don't know, it could be could be could be um like what would that even? Or maybe there's no reason to believe that's pretty rare um. They could have been raised in a very neglectful way themselves. They could have odd belief systems, um conspiratorial, I mean, who knows, um. But that wouldn't be mice. That wouldn't be my initial hypothesis. My initial hypothesis would be that, uh well, my initial hypothesis with the parents would be that they were raised in a way that taught them important lessons to them that when you run into it was like this, you give up or you just put it on the kid and say, well, it's your life. So you made your bed, you're gonna live in it. Like I'm guessing both parents got a hefty amount of pathological If you made your bed, you have to lie

23:18 in it. Nothing mental illness wise, because there's really yeah, I mean you could have some sort of social anxiety or some sort of personality disorder for sure, But nothing jumps out at me as an obvious candidate. It makes sense. Well, we will find out. The trial is June nineteenth, twenty three. They're charge with second degree murder in Louisiana. Yeah, I want to respect your time and if you had any closing thoughts, and I'll mention your podcasts again psychology in Seattle pest you for anything interesting. Second, yeah, I given the details that you've told, I could see that the second degree murder charges sticking because, like I said, every day they had an opportunity to try something else and they didn't. They just they you know, we could have sympathy for the position. It's not like they woke up in the morning and said, we're going to kill our child. But there were millions of opportunities for them to wake up one day and say like, okay, we've got to call someone like we got to do. Because if they would have called the right person, you could almost claim the physician might be partially to blame too, because they didn't follow up. They didn't connect them with another service like well, if they refuse, here's a number you

24:51 should call or something like that, or do a follow up like did you because they should have known. They probably a heard that. I'm guessing that the parents told the physician. I don't know that the kid, the adult kid at that point hadn't left the couch for fifteen years. I'm guessing that there was some sort of presentation of information. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, I could see the second degree murder charging sticking. And I would say that given the details that I've heard as a citizen, I think they deserve to be prosecuted and sentenced on that because, like I said, like just even as a human being, you know, it sucks. That's the other thing, a part it like aside from that which I hold. But there are so many parents right now with special needs kids who may or may not even be young adults at this point, and it's so hard even with services. And then the fact that you live in a community that doesn't have access to service or you don't know how to access those services or when you it's a very it's just a very very very difficult situation for these families, and they feel ashamed, and you know, you walk out the door, you go on the internet and everyone's talking about autism like it's this special, quirky thing and it's not a big deal. And or they're talking about autism like it's the precursor to murder like in Sandy Hook. You just or autism

26:27 is caused by diet or vaccines. You know, there's so much nonsense pseudo science out there, and you know, might diet play a role in one symptom. Sure, but anyway, and then yeah, there's just so much suffering going on because as a society and as a government, we completely ignore these people. And so you just have to figure if we were better as a system, this probably wouldn't have happened. Oh, can I ask you just one more quick question? Sure? Um, just to follow up on that line of thinking. This was what I was trying to think of earlier. If a community was underfunded, such as we had in this case where we think we did, what would happen if a if a child was unable to care for themselves in such an extreme capacity and the parents did call, would that child go to some kind of special needs home or if there was no funding or what would happen? Well, special needs homes are very expensive and if the parents can't pay for it, which the parents in the United States wouldn't be able to afford these things because you know, you're talking five hundred a thousand dollars a day kind of thing. Actually, um, I mean maybe not that much, but a definite state run hospital that they would, but that that requires tax dollars to be allocated to such and you know,

28:00 there's a lot of anti government anti taxes in our country. That basically negates these things from being an option for people. So there are facilities waiting for that funding, but the ones that do exist, there's such a limited set of beds that the state has to gate keep who gets into those beds, and it's only the most severe Like if you had a if those parents had died, for example, prior to this death of the child, and the authorities showed up, you know that she would have gone into one of those facilities. She would have gone somewhere. You know that the government does dump her on the side. I mean sometimes they honestly, they do just dump them on the side of the street. But but if there are parents, generally speaking, the government will well, we'll say, well but you have a you know, you know, because the parents would be petition and the government would say, but you have the capacity to take care of this kid, let's throw some more services at you. But you know, you're not as hard up of a case as other I mean, you can even have violence. You can even have a kid who's being violent, threatening to the parents, and there's still not enough beds or funding. So yeah, well, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate your insights and everybody please go check out Psychology and Seattle. Just search for it in

29:33 your podcast app or on YouTube. Phenomenal podcast, and again thank you for joining us. Thanks I'll check out your podcast. I like true crime and it sounds like you cover some interesting cases