There are schools of thought maintaining that children act out their parents’ insanity, and Karen de la Carriere does much to forward the premise of that theory. Her father, according to friends, was an abusive alcoholic who died when she was just 12 years old.
Her mother was brutalized by psychiatry in the early 1950s, relates another close associate of de la Carriere’s. Throughout de la Carriere’s childhood and teen years, her mother was in and out of mental institutions and received some 50 electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) shocks.
De la Carriere showed the same psychotic symptoms as her mother. And for those who knew her, the parallels are obvious. Her mother would go into violent and verbal tirades against people and then lapse into periods of quiet and reflection.
In 1968, de la Carriere landed in a mental institution for an attempted suicide. And later, in just one year, she made a dozen calls to her then-husband, threatening suicide.
One time while in the UK on business, de la Carriere decided to find her brother. The private investigator she hired did not find him but did find her mother she had not seen for 30 years. When they met, de la Carriere refused to call her “mother” which set off a violent argument with de la Carriere threatening to smash her mother’s skull. They never saw each other again.