Tromp family meltdown?

home. Meanwhile, Riana, hundreds of miles from home, becomes disoriented and hides in the back of a truck. She is discovered by the startled driver when, driving along, he hears a banging noise coming from the back of the vehicle. According to the driver, Riana is “catatonic” and doesn’t know her name or where she is from. He takes her to a local psychiatric hospital. She is admitted for treatment.

Over the course of the next three days, Jacoba, the mother, parts ways with husband Mark. Like her daughter, Jacoba is disoriented and found wandering in a town a few hundred miles away from home. She, too, is admitted to the local psychiatric facility. Finally, last Saturday, Mark, the father, is found wandering along a road near Wangaratta airport north of Melbourne. All the pieces of the jigsaw have been found.

Piecing it all together to understand why this family fled and subsequently fragmented won’t be straightforward. Media reports suggest it may turn out to be a case of “folie à deux” or, to be more precise, “folie en famille”: a term used in psychiatry to describe a shared delusion or psychosis between people who are usually closely related and close-knit. It’s a bit like conjunctivitis of the mind: given the right conditions, it spreads easily and quickly and obscures vision. In this case, it’s impossible to tell whether the “right” conditions existed for a shared paranoid disorder but reports suggest it was the father, Mark Tromp, who was the primary delusional individual. According to his children, he became convinced that people were coming to kill him and his family and to take all his money. He insisted that mobiles should be left at home as he believed all the family phones were being tracked.

Little is known about the family history or dynamics, but it is understood that both the parents felt under extreme stress for a prolonged period. The family, understandably, now says it needs privacy to work through what really happened to them.

Folie en famille, although relatively rare, is much more likely to occur in families who are very close and over-identified with one another, or in some way isolated. Usually, there will be one dominant personality who is suffering from psychosis who then “infects” the more dependent family members. Paradoxically, often the less dominant members buy into believing in the delusions of the dominant member in order to keep the family together and prevent it from breaking down.

What is striking about this case is that it was played out in front of the world’s media. All families have crises but they usually happen behind closed doors. A family unravelling in the privacy of its own four walls is one thing; unravelling on the world stage is a different story altogether.