According to Rusty, her serious mental problems only became apparent after the birth of their fourth son, Luke, in February of 1999. Four months later, on June 16, Rusty took Andrea and the kids from the bus and to her mother's home after Andrea became agitated and withdrawn; in a later interview she expressed feeling "overwhelming anxiety and sadness." The next day her mother found her passed out on a bed after taking 40 or 50 tablets of her father's antidepressant Trazodone. "She states she just wanted to sleep forever," her chart from Methodist Hospital read. "Doesn't want to die, but wants the misery to go away." Andrea spent six days at the hospital, during which she participated in group therapy sessions. She was also given the antidepressant Zoloft for what was diagnosed by her doctor as a "major depressive disorder" probably triggered by the recent birth of her son.

Over the next month at home, however, her condition did not improve much. For one thing she refused to take her medication, out of a general aversion to taking any pill she didn't think she needed. At times she became so nervous and upset she scratched several bald spots onto her scalp. On the evening of July 21, 1999, Rusty found her in the bathroom holding a steak knife to her throat. "Let me do it," she said, before he wrestled the knife away. She was taken to Memorial Spring Shadows Glen, a private psychiatric facility, in a virtually catatonic state. That's where she finally told doctors that she was hearing voices and having visions involving a knife. "I had a fear I would hurt somebody," she told a psychologist. "I thought it better to end my own life and prevent it." What seemed to snap her out of her state was a shot of Haldol, a powerful antipsychotic drug. "In a day she was on her feet," says Rusty. She also began taking antidepressants Wellbutrin and Effexor.

Andrea spent three weeks at Spring Shadows Glen. Under the medications, she showed progress. Even so, staffers were stunned to learn that she and Rusty still were not averse to having more children. "Apparently patient and husband plan to have as many babies as nature will allow!" read one astonished notation on her chart. "This will surely guarantee future psychotic depression." So why didn't Rusty, seeing his wife's suffering, put his foot down and insist they stop at four kids? To begin with, he maintains, no one at the facility ever mentioned to him that Andrea had violent fantasies and had voiced fears of harming others (the clinic declines comment). Nor, he says, had she told him. He also says he assumed that if she had problems with mental illness after any subsequent kids she could get another round of Haldol to make her well again. "We counted each child as a blessing, not a burden," he says. "(If she got depressed again) there would be the same symptoms and she would get the same treatment." He knows now it's not that simple. "I've since learned that depression is worse with subsequent children," he says.

-- BILL HEWITT
-- BOB STEWART and GABRIELLE COSGRIFF in Houston