Someone wrote this on Facebook. This is the first I've heard of it:
Hot takes on the Lindsay Clancy case:
(Summary- Lindsay Clancy might very well be guilty and deserve punishment; we’re not Lindsay Clancy and we don’t actually know her reality; Turns out scientific thinkers are also susceptible to conspiracy theory, ie Patrick Clancy
; some of our reactions aren’t a good look for feminism)
1) Wayyyyy too many women are jumping to say she’s innocent without knowing the evidence. I don’t know which way I would vote if I were on the jury at this point bc there hasn’t been enough evidence to say that beyond a reasonable doubt
she knew right from wrong or that
she had control of her behavior.
At the end of the day, 3 children were violently murdered and the state has a duty to pursue justice (not necessarily with competent prosecutors apparently though)
Look. I have a lot in common with Lindsay Clancy. We’re both type A perfectionists who consumed volumes on how to parent well. Feeling like you’re drowning to give all the kids the care they need defined that time of my life. Agonizing over breastfeeding, their health, development and sleep consumed me. I have had severe PPD. I had 3 young children, none of them good sleepers, one a (wonderful) very big handful. I barely slept. My husband was in residency he physically wasn’t able to share the load even though he wanted to. I also had a horror story with a clinician not treating me correctly. I could have made the exact same journal entries she did.
Parts of her experience resonate so hard they shake me.
But I AM NOT LINDSAY CLANCY AND NEITHER ARE YOU. We have to be sooo careful that in the absence of data we don’t pull from our own. We actually can’t say that we relate to her and therefore we would have had to lost control and our morals to commit the same crime. We’re not her and we don’t know all the evidence.
Plus—and don’t get me started—we don’t get to paint Patrick Clancy as a villain without evidence bc we want desperately for Lindsay to be a victim. If you have a theory about Patrick then supply evidence and not just some Tucker Carlson bs like “I’m not saying he did it but I’m just wondering about that email”. Yikes. Just stop.
2) If you actually listen to the trial you will see that yes, mistakes were made by psychiatrists. They should have taken a much more thorough history, talked to each other, done some blood work, etc etc. But the fact remains that to commit her given her reported symptoms would have violated her constitutional rights.
Also, one reason that she went back and forth with medicine was her own choosing as well. It was a very nuanced mess and not cut and dry. Just saying they threw medicine at her isn’t accurate. Did it cause psychosis? Maybe, but we aren’t experts so how do we know? That testimony is coming.
3) PSYCHOSIS MAY HAVE BEEN A NECESSARY FACTOR BUT NOT SUFFICIENT to say she wasn’t clinically responsible for the murders.
Assume she had a command hallucination. One option was for her to say, **** off to the voice. Not everyone with command hallucinations obey. But she could have also had some dissociation and felt like she lost control of her agency. That’s also possible. We haven’t been given sufficient evidence.
Sometimes women kill their children when they want to commit suicide to keep them all together or to spare them from the horrors of the world or leave them without a mom. Can they know what they’re doing, choose to do it, plan it, and know it’s illegal? Also yes and that makes them guilty. You don’t get a pass if you also tried to kill yourself.
Lindsay was having the best day she had had for weeks and even seemed happy before murdering her children and attempting suicide. That’s a common pattern for suicide attempts. It should have been a red flag. Again, if you want to kill yourself, that is a horrific tragedy. You still don’t get to kill your children. Still a crime.
WE DO NOT WANT TO SET A PRECEDENT THAT CLAIMING INSANITY WITHOUT PROVIDING SOLID EVIDENCE. To do otherwise fails future victims. That ain’t justice.
4) Emotions can’t override facts. My heart broke for Lindsay as she wailed in court with grief. I believe that was authentic. I believe she regrets her actions and misses her children desperately. I also believe she had planned to be dead. Anguish (no matter how awful) does not change facts.
5) The prosecution are idiots. They don’t understand mental health, how to have a theory or how to communicate it. Instead of evidence, they appeal to horror and emotional shock. Shameful. Full stop. The greasy hair with a bow is distracting bc it’s unprofessional. If a man did something like say, wear tennis shoes with paw patrol on them and have dirty hair I would also complain.
6) I’m a feminist, which means I believe in equal rights and fair treatment. What feminist women are saying about Patrick Clancy isn’t pro-women. It’s projecting a persona of narcissism and a manipulating neglectful father onto someone without any evidence to back it up. It’s believing conspiracy theories when you think you’re above conspiracies. It’s not a good look frankly. Why are we more quick to scrutinize and consume misinformation about the father that understand the mother when she is not contesting she murdered them. There are SO many male villains who need to be held accountable. Doesn’t mean he was one. The fact that we are more willing to call a man guilty without evidence than a woman for whom we don’t have all the evidence feels pretty sexist to me.
We’re mothers. More than anyone else we should focus on children. The solid fact we DO have is that innocent children were killed and our priority should be justice for them. What that justice looks like should incorporate evidence from witnesses and experts as to their mother’s criminal culpability.
Im a mother. A child will always be my priority. And I’m also a feminist and as such I would want the same process of weighing evidence that I want for Lindsay. Rushing to judgement in favor of Lindsay Clancy isn’t feminist.
What this case is doing is bringing to light is the very serious gap in support for women in the PP period.
6) I’m actually not convinced that this was a total system failure. Mistakes were made, yes. AND women were also recovering in this system. I am not ready to categorically place direct blame on the system for these deaths. Was it a bad system? On net, I would agree to that. Is some of this being overstated and not reflecting in the evidence? Also, yes.
What I want to shed a light on also is the fact that honestly, this is how psychiatry works—try something, tweak it, get off it over a couple weeks to try something new, add a combo, titrate, taper, do it all again. Compare the evolution of psychiatric medicine to medicine in any other field. Yeah…we don’t really know what we’re doing still. Maybe we should fund this research as much as others. Someone should probably be committed but that’s so hard to do?—right bc of our constitution and laws; this is a hard balance. Our psych hospitals and programs generally suck. Yes they do. And guess who is planning to tackle this directly now—RFJ jr. We’re not exactly moving forward.
Moral of the story—more research, well funded, fully staffed evidence-based programs, solid policy. The psychiatric healthcare system is what it is bc of foundational issues that might fall outside individual clinicians.
7) All that said, where I am right now is that I haven’t seen a good case made by the prosecution that would exclude all reasonable doubt that she knew what she was doing and had control of her behavior. But I don’t think we’ve seen enough yet. And also, see #5–they’re not exactly the best legal team ever. I don’t know that they even have a good idea of what they’re arguing so I’m kinda starting with some reasonable doubt that they’ll provide good evidence.
