(Nov. 11, 2014) Following a family excursion to watch a soccer game and enjoy the park, 27-year-old Catherine Hoggle took one of her toddlers, Jacob, to eat pizza and returned alone (“Family implores mentally ill mother to tell them where she left her missing children,” the Washington Post, Nov. 10).
The next morning, the other toddler, Sarah, disappeared and Hoggle claims to have taken her to daycare. Both children have been missing ever since.
Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Hoggle had been showing increasing signs of paranoia in the year leading up to the children’s disappearance, even going so far as to file a restraining order against her sister-in-law for following her.
“We go to the grocery store, she shows up there,” Hoggle told Montgomery County Judge Barry Hamilton when she filed the order. “We start going to a different grocery store, she starts showing up there. I go to take my kids to the pediatrician, she shows up there. I go to my mom’s house, she shows up there.”
Disturbed by the young mother’s behavior, family members sought a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation and Hoggle was committed to inpatient treatment at Sheppard Pratt two times in 2013.
Throughout Hoggle’s struggle with severe mental illness, Troy Turner, the children’s father, “encouraged Catherine to go to therapy and take her medication but he couldn’t be sure she was doing either.”
After multiple hospitalizations have failed, family members should be able to do more than just encourage their loved ones into treatment. While we don’t know much about Hoggle's history of non-adherence to medication, we do know that few states in America make it harder to get treatment for someone with a severe mental illness than Maryland.
Maryland is one of only five states that remain without an assisted outpatient treatment (AOT) law, and it has a high threshold for providing mandatory treatment in a hospital.
A bill introducing AOT is expected by the end of the year, but it can’t come fast enough for people with severe mental illness and their families.
Police in Montgomery County, Maryland, have asked anyone with information about the Hoggle children or the case to call 240-773-5070.
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