Lindsay Clancy murdered her three kids. This is not disputed, but the internet is doing what it always does, turning a horrific tragedy into a dumb morality play. The hot takes that you’re seeing everywhere are pretty much all garbage.
The case is about mental illness and postpartum psychosis and a field of medical care, psychiatry, that is far less competent and knowledgeable than people very often believe.
Many psychiatrists will tell you this: The human brain is a mystery. We don’t know very much about it. It is not like a broken leg. It is not as though you hurt your spleen.
Much of the narrative hot takes online about Lindsay Clancy have been disturbingly stupid and idiotic. There are real questions that we have to ask, about things like overdiagnosis of various conditions, or about relations between male and female, or the difficulties of childbearing and mirroring.
That is not this case.
This case is a very specific set of facts. And the big takeaway, for me, is that mental illness is real. The practice of psychiatry is rudimentary. You have to take extraordinary care when you’re dealing with people who have severe mental illness, and that includes psychiatrists, who have a tremendously difficult job because they’re dealing with people who are legitimately psychotic in many cases.
But it is also true that the care can be spotty sometimes. It’s not comprehensive enough. These are difficult problems, and sometimes there is no easy solution.
I know we’re always looking for the easy take or the easy solution. Sometimes there just isn’t one.
One reason the case became a hot topic was that Clancy’s parents started a GoFundMe for their living expenses while they cared for Lindsay.
Between her paralysis and the trial proceedings, the goal is $2 million. About $850,000 has been raised so far, with most of the accompanying comments coming from moms sympathizing with Lindsay because of her postpartum psychosis.
I don’t have a hot take on this situation.
If you are saying that this situation is “just like me,” it isn’t. It’s an actual psychological condition that is different from your own psychiatric condition.
It’s not the same thing.
There are some morons and lib women on TikTok who are trying to argue that Clancy shouldn’t be prosecuted at all, and that her husband is somehow the killer, because we have all frontally lobotomized ourselves with the internet. We’ve made ourselves massively dumber.
Then there is the generalized conservative response you sometimes see: “Lindsay Clancy was not the victim. Her children were.”
No one is denying the victimhood of the kids. No one, no one, no one.
I can’t even look at the pictures.
I have five children of my own, including a newborn. I can’t look at the pictures. It’s horrific.
That is not the question in this case. The question is whether she was in her right mind enough to be held responsible for her actions in that way. She is likely going to go to a psychiatric ward for the rest of her life because of this.
The idea that she’s just going to be released and be out on the street waiting to kill again is not what we are talking about here.
And then there are some people who say that we should get rid of the insanity plea altogether and simply execute psychotic killers.
That is a vast gap from the traditional biblical response to the problem of human agency. If it were a binary choice between “Let psychiatric psychotic killers roam free,” or “kill them,” I would choose to kill them. That’s because you have to prefer the interests of society over the interests of the psychotic killer.
But that is not the choice. One of the choices is involuntary commitment for as long as it takes, in order to ensure that the person is sane. That is likely to be, in this particular case, the rest of her life, because the psychotic break can happen at any time. As we know, she was under psychiatric care; she was released and then did the crime.
But all of this speaks to the difficulty that we have in not being able to deal with certain facts of life.
Not all problems are immediately solvable.