Throwaway05
22hr ago
Clancy, on the other hand, had some history of psychiatric treatment, but not nearly to the same degree Yates did.
To expand on this, she was evaluated many times prior to the killings (including specifically for the type of pathology she allegedly exhibits) and those many evaluations did not find she had that type of illness.
Usually in these cases the person has a known and obvious illness or has never presented for psychiatric care.
It seems questionable that someone had been seen by probably more than a dozen mental health workers of various types and nobody spotted it. Either her presentation was exceptionally unusual, she lied about her symptoms, or she was able to minimize in a very productive way. Or she made it up on the advice of her attorney.
Throwaway05
22hr ago
I think it's better characterized as an extension of the increasing trend towards people feeling very comfortable having opinions (especially those that are political adjacent) without any expertise or full context and the related resistance to updating views on getting new information (especially from experts), as well as just lack of critical analysis (especially from social media).
Most of the takes I've seen that engage with the facts are missing pretty big pieces of legal or medical context leading to incorrect or incomplete conclusions - and unlike with "real" scissors people who want to hear more about the circumstances update pretty strongly.
I've also seen takes that totally don't engage with the facts at all, like female doctors going "IDK the husband seems sus" and just refusing to actually look at information about the case, just sucking up whatever pops on TikTok.
It's pure brain rot.
Throwaway05
1d ago
A complex discussion about SSRI side effects leading to unmasking of occult bipolar disorder is not the kind of thing that spreads well on social media, especially in the setting of the defense actively presenting (lets call it biased) information to the jury to make their case.
Everybody is taking out their favorite axes to grind on this one, but that doesn't really help clear anything up.
Throwaway05
1d ago
Post partum psychosis is not post partum depression. Post partum psychosis is an immediate psychiatric emergency with significant threat to mother and child and different symptoms.
PPP vs. Bipolar are the two main psychiatric entities raised by the defense, to my understanding.
Throwaway05
1d ago
It depends on what is happening.
Most of these people fit into specific buckets, which bucket tells you what to do, for example -
-Motivated by secondary gain? (Ex: stimulant seeking). May become a drug addict, otherwise not too problematic since they are doing this to succeed and don't end up in the fail state.
-People who actually just have depression or anxiety and don't want to admit that? Get them treatment for what they actually have.
-People with "something else" many of these people have a personality disorder or something like a conversion disorder and they've found a way to excuse their psychology and experiences. If you can get them the treatment for what they have, do so. Many of these people were never going to flourish anyway.
Lots of people get shunted into all three buckets at higher rates because of modernity sucking.
Throwaway05
2d ago
There is a strong element of the very popular "anti-psychiatry" and "anti-healthcare" trends. This is absurdly popular online you can see lots of stories of "I brought my husband to the doctor so they would listen" and so on. Never mind that most healthcare workers are female.
In this case it's stupid because she was clearly doctor shopping, signed herself out of inpatient care, and at best lied about her symptoms to multiple people involved in her care.
These kind of people don't let facts get in the way however.
Throwaway05
2d ago
Please see example of Grandma above.
Throwaway05
2d ago
While I wish it wasn't as big of a deal as it is, it is filling that "scandalous legal case" niche that happens periodically in America (what was the last one, Heard vs Depp?) with the biggest probably being OJ.
A lot of the country is thinking about it, in a time where most media isn't scratching that broad itch if you want to know what your common man is doing, it's this.
Throwaway05
2d ago
I don't buy the insanity defense. I can't think of a mother I know that wouldn't do suicide attempts till success if she did such thing in a moment of blackout. It is just not something you can live with when the haze over your brain lifts.
This cuts both ways - the murders were probably not cold blooded, if they were she wouldn't have tried to kill herself and she would have done things in a way that she could have had a life afterwards. The cause of the behavior was probably something else - a formal personality disorder (ex: Borderline), issues of general personality structure, or "less serious" mental illness (like postpartum depression, other forms of depression, or anxiety) interacting with stressors and other features of her environment. These things should not impair her "reality testing" and should leave her with an understanding that what she is doing is morally wrong and a shitty idea. That type of explanation is going to function pretty similarly to a psychotic state in terms of feeling miserable about events afterwards. For both she'd end up with some pretty hefty treatment afterwards to try and reduce the impulse to suicide. They'd look the same three years later, at least looking from the outside as we are.
Just giving flesh to the meme that the only thing white liberal women really fear is accountability.
Much as my impulse is to give them zero credit I can't really do that here. Most people are aware of men as the sex of violence and killing, and some people are aware of "family annihilator" crime (as this may have been) and when that happens it almost always men. If you live in a bubble with little crime than you just aren't going to see the existence of cases like this or of women committing violence, which does happen in the real world but not in their milieu.
Throwaway05
2d ago
While the information I have is somewhat limited, with the information I have I do not believe she was afflicted by a psychiatric condition that would make her not guilty. It is worth noting that she was examined by one of the gods of forensic healthcare and while he is somewhat doddering at this time he did side with the defense (and has more information than I do).
All of that being said, what you are saying is both somewhat untrue historically (and is more of a meme than anything) and is very specifically not applicable to the conditions being evaluated in this case (ex: psychosis).
This is a complex technical discussion involving healthcare and legal structures, people trying to shove the culture war into it are walking into a long running conversation with limited understanding.
Throwaway05
2d ago
The steelman is the claim that she was being abused and her husband made her psychotic.
Not quite, see my post, but the specific mechanisms raised by the defense and community for psychosis have been very variable and include things like abuse, medication side effects, baseline mental illness, and post-partum illness (which is a rare but real thing).
Throwaway05
2d ago
The strong argument is basically:
-
Some crimes shouldn't result in a "guilty verdict" because of mental illness.
-
Lindsay had one of those illnesses at the time of the murder therefore she was not "responsible."*
-
Which illness she had is a bit vague - post-partum psychosis and bipolar have been passed around as possible explanations.
The weaker argument is basically:
- "No, no, the husband did it!"**
The weaker argument is far more common than is in any way acceptable. It is also very stupid. The strong argument is very strong and is the rule of the land - not guilty by reason of insanity is a thing and should be a thing. If it applies to her case or not is a technical discussion, which is causing problems.
*There are very specific rules for this and this really should be the case. "I have borderline personality disorder, a DSM recognized mental illness, therefore I can get away with murder" ...we have decided that's bullshit, and that seems a reasonable decision. "My grandma got sent to jail because she attacked her nurse because her UTI made her temporarily crazy" is also bullshit and not sending her to prison is a good decision for society.
**A side game here appears to be liberal, privileged white women who cannot imagine a woman would do something bad for any reason. For them it seems easy to imagine a man killing his kids but a woman.
Throwaway05
2d ago
Nikki loved Bear more than anyone else in the world.
I don't think this is in the text, if you look at real world examples you can find plenty of people who love their partner more than anything else - but they may love other things also, they may sacrifice their relationship with their love to help them and so on.
Nikki loves to the exclusion of anything else and in the worst possible and most toxic way. Loving someone more than anything else doesn't need to result in literal murder etc.
If the wish wasn't monkey's pawed you'd see something more like normal relationships where a partner is very much into the other partner.
Throwaway05
4d ago
I envisioned someone sitting on the side of his chest to try and immobilize him while they got more bodies involved to flip and cuff. If you slip toward the head instead of staying on the thoracic cavity....
On the other hand could have just been a mad scramble with people rolling around, ive seen that too.
Throwaway05
4d ago
Restraining someone who does not want to be restrained requires either beating them until they don't resist anymore or using human mass to prevent their movement. Ideally this involves multiple people on each limb and restraining their trunk. If you have less people you may need to be leaning on someone in an attempt to prevent their moving. Since this happens very quickly in an uncontrolled situation and the person being restrained will use any freedom of movement available to them it's easy to miss that you've left open a degree of freedom. People being restrained will generally do what they can - that means biting, spitting - if a cop is kneeling on you and your limbs are restrained but your head isn't.....
Throwaway05
4d ago
I think this is the only scenario that I could really accept - if the killings happened in her first episode of psychosis, prior to treatment. It's going to come down to how thorough her psychiatrists were in documenting the progression and severity of her symptoms, so they can generate a rough timeline of her illness. I think we will probably never know these details and can only hope the court does its due diligence.
My understanding is that she was consistently appropriately assessed for psychotic symptoms through a longitudinal series of interactions with multiple providers including during an inpatient stay. None endorsed and none observed until she met with a defense hired witness (and this was all presented in court).
Now the above could certainly have been misrepresented to me, but I don't think there is really any consistent evidence of psychosis.
That goes a long way towards making criminal liability appropriate.
Throwaway05
5d ago
I'm quite interested in the differential, even if the information to really figure it out isn't available (and it wouldn't be appropriate anyway).
The impression I got is that she didn't endorse any CAH before or after the killings until meeting with someone hired by her defense. If this is true....yikes.
While patients lie about and minimize AH all the time it's usually noticeable enough, especially in someone getting enhanced scrutiny (for instance after murdering their children).
I'm therefore not sure I buy that she has some form of postpartum psychosis or unmasked BP w/PF, especially given the blatant doctor shopping, help seeking/unseeking behavior, and odd regimens (which can of course stem from poor clinical care but usually involves some element of questionable patient decision making).
If you toss out primary psychotic pathology it rapidly gets really interesting (and this dovetails into your original post). The observed behaviors are demonstrably abhorrent. Do you need to automatically catch a diagnosis as a result?
DSM personality pathology requires persistence and pervasiveness, I haven't heard any evidence to establish that. Is this instead Cluster-B adjacent coping mechanisms in the setting of some other process such as anxiety, depression, or abusive behavior from the accused of being personality disordered himself husband?
I don't think laymen should really be weighing in on criminality and legal proceedings for psychosis because that gets thorny pretty quickly (aka what is Anosognosia anyway?), but I think it's pretty mainstream and reasonable to treat DSM personality pathology (especially BPD and ASPD) as criminality instead of insanity. Likewise terrible stuff that doesn't quite fit into a diagnostic box.
Although if psychosis was present - it's easy to underestimate the danger in first episode psychosis, without proper practice managing symptoms things can go off the rails very fast.
Throwaway05
5d ago
I started a comment and then remembered you might be one of the people with an actual medical background so I won't perseverate and will ignore some of the misunderstandings of people below.
What's your read on the actual dx? I've been trying my best to avoid the details but the case is now everywhere so might as well try and dig in.
I've also spotted an interesting culture war element, even in medicine (and even among my friends who work in mental health) nearly all of the women don't think she did it (they blame the husband). Most of the men? Think she did it (and with most of those also thinking it wasn't psychosis).
The only exception I've run into was a forensic psychologist.
Perhaps something to chew on.
Fair enough!
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