Michel Cadotte’s decision-making process was affected by depression the day he killed his long-suffering wife with a pillow, a psychiatrist has told his murder trial.
Louis Morissette took the witness stand Wednesday to deliver his evaluation of Cadotte’s mental health when he suffocated his wife on Feb. 20, 2017.
Cadotte, 57, is charged with second-degree murder in the death of Jocelyne Lizotte, 60, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s.
Testifying for the defence, Morissette said Cadotte was aware of his actions that day but his decision was affected by loneliness and the stress of having looked after his wife for years with little outside support from family.
He was not in a state of total disorganization in terms of his thoughts or his cognitive processes.”
“(Cadotte) was not hallucinating, visually or otherwise. He was not delirious,” Morissette said, reading from a 19-page evaluation he had prepared. “He was not in a state of total disorganization in terms of his thoughts or his cognitive processes.”
However, he said, “we are of the opinion that his actions were the result of a troubled decision-making process that was unusual for (Cadotte), tied to (emotional) suffering, chronic and acute suffering over a long period of time (including severing ties to his loved ones).”
Morissette noted Cadotte was “socially isolated” in the months before Lizotte’s death while she was living at a long-term nursing home.
Lizotte was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a decade before she was killed, and in her final years spent her days strapped to a chair or a bed to prevent her from hurting herself as she rocked back and forth uncontrollably while awake.
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“He visited his wife regularly, offering her support and performing certain tasks (cleaning her and feeding her) but he practically had no social life, was interested in nothing else but his wife and his work, drank alcohol and consumed cannabis to obtain a sense of well being and to be able to sleep a little better (but the substances only aggravated his ability to sleep),” Morissette wrote in his report.
The psychiatrist said Cadotte was diagnosed with a “major depression” in 2013 but was doing better in 2017.
He said Cadotte probably could have benefitted from a recommended increase in the dosage of the medication he was taking to treat his depression but he refused it because he feared returning to a past when he was addicted to cocaine.
The trial resumes Thursday.
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