"Normal" people can be taught some self-awareness and shown that the way they are thinking is not the only way to see something. I guess that is how cognitive behaviour therapy works in people prone to depression.

I don't know to what extent Matthews was psychoanalysed, but I do recall hearing a comment in the coverage that she is not capable of putting her chidren's needs above her own. And she had seven of them, seemingly using them as benefit-tickets. I have heard no evidence that she loved them. Can she be held accountable for her actions? Well, if she ended up in prison rather than in a secure hospital, maybe the court thinks she can.

This woman's mindset seems to be so far from the norm, intellectually and emotionally, she must be classified as abnormal, subnormal, sociopathic in some way. So what she was doing living unsupervised and largely unwatched, is a mystery.

Years ago people like her, with seven children with several different fathers, would have been locked up for immorality in an institution and never heard of again. This case makes me wonder whether "care in the community" or lack of it, hasn't gone far too far.