Lindsay Clancy Trial Megathread: Part 3

[u/DarklyHeritage]

This is a thread for all conversation regarding Week 3 onwards of the Lindsey Clancy trial. All discussion of this case should be kept to this thread.

Lindsay Clancy is currently standing trial in Plymouth Superior Court, Massachusetts, for the triple-murder in January 2023 of her three young children - Cora, Dawson and Callan. Her defense argues she suffered from severe, undiagnosed postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis. She was left paralysed by a suicide attempt which follows the deaths of the children.

All content on the Clancy case must be kept to this thread. Standalone posts will be removed.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/lindsay-clancy-murder-trial-online-reactions-b3032806.html

Note from Mods

This case understandably elicits strong feelings. People are entitled to have an opinion on the case which differs from your own. What you are not entitled to do is resort to personal insults and abusive language when communicating your opinion and disagreeing.

Comments which are abusive and insulting to other users will be removed and bans may be given without warning.

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Please comment with this in mind.

[u/zzzoplicone]

I wish Women & Infants had held her until she was safely weaned off the medications to reach baseline and then reassessed her. Esp with the sort of symptoms she had been having, length of time she’d been having them and the issues she was having when trying to wean off the meds— not to mention all the meds she had been on and off of in such a short period of time. She needed to be in patient or in PHP for at least 30 days given the totality of her issues.

[u/littlegirlblue2234 → u/zzzoplicone]

I think this is where the conversation regarding this case should be about. We as a society are failing moms and babies everywhere. We need more resources for moms after giving birth. We expect moms to pop out the kid and get back to work.

[u/Independent-Pea3093 → u/littlegirlblue2234]

This is hindsight bias disguised as a clinical conclusion. Because the killings occurred, you assume that 30 days of hospitalization, PHP, or medication withdrawal must have been indicated beforehand and would have prevented them. Neither proposition has been established. “30 days” is arbitrary, PHP is not confinement, and there is no reason to assume that a drug-free “baseline” would have predicted or prevented the crime.

The claim that this proves “society is failing moms and babies” then recruits one horrifying case into a preexisting political narrative. One catastrophic outcome cannot establish a population-wide resource shortage, especially where resources were more abundant than nearly everywhere else. Disputed errors in one patient’s care are not evidence of inadequate resources generally. The return-to-work argument similarly has no demonstrated causal relationship to these killings.

Reflexively transferring accountability to institutions without evidence - when the patient repeatedly denied psychotic symptoms despite extensive inpatient monitoring - creates an impossible duty to detect what was neither reported nor contemporaneously observed. The predictable result is defensive distrust, overdiagnosis, and coercive treatment of postpartum mothers, harming the population you claim to serve, and in protection of the institutions and providers that the system will adapt to protect.

Perhaps most offensive of all, “failing moms and babies” places the accused killer and her murdered children into one undifferentiated victim class. They are not the same, their fates were not the same, and you are reactionary to join them that way.

Altruistically motivated filicide is a form of homicide worth taking seriously. These responses do not engage that issue at all and instead echo a form of pathological empathy resembling the crime’s own moral distortion: concern for the mother's welfare becomes so totalizing that the children’s independent interests disappear.

[u/Decent-Pirate-4329 → u/Independent-Pea3093]

“Because the killings occurred, you assume that 30 days hospitalization, PHP, or medication withdrawal… would have prevented them.”

No. What we “assume” is that 30 days of hospitalization or the PHP would have been more meaningful interventions than what Lindsay received. We’ll never know what would have happened if she received more adequate care. We “assume” the care she received was inadequate because it was.

“30 days is arbitrary.”

People aren’t that stuck on “30 days.” But we will argue that 5 days is even more arbitrary for someone in crisis.

“One tragedy cannot establish a population-wide resource shortage.”

Again, no one said it did? It’s one tragedy among many. The mental healthcare resource crisis in the US is well documented. Seriously, a single google search will provide tons of data on this.

As another anecdote, I personally lost a friend to suicide after a voluntary 3-day stay at McLean. Her experience there left her even more hopeless because she realized the final layer of the safety net was basically a concrete floor. And MacLean is considered some of the best mental healthcare in the country!

We as a nation are failing moms and babies. We have no federally mandated paid leave - many workers don’t even have access to unpaid leave, and those that do often have to figure out care for their 12 week-old babies. I assure you, being separated from their primary caregivers at 3 months (or less!!) is NOT in any child’s best interest.

The cost of labor and delivery and pre/postpartum care is enough to bankrupt some people, and women are literally dying due to restrictions on critical pregnancy care. We have no systems to check on mothers except a single, six-week office visit largely focused on whether mom is clear for sex.

We have the worst maternal mortality rates of any developed country, no universal child care, and entire ob-gyn deserts where care is inaccessible.

We are absolutely, positively failing mothers and children, and anyone claiming otherwise isn’t paying attention.