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DEAR FELLOW MEN: You’re making us all look like emotionally-stunted meatheads over this Lindsay Clancy thing
Tracey's takes are always interesting to me, and I enjoy his writing because I often find myself on either side of his opinions on a case by case basis. This time, I'm somewhat against him.
I don't doubt that plenty of men have had less than respectable takes on this case, but the far-and-away more interesting story surrounding this case is the social media response from women at large.
Tracey seems particularly focused on the first-degree conviction that the state is trying to prove, but that's not so interesting to me. Whether she spends 50 years behind bars or 50 years in a mental institute doesn't make a difference to me, really.
I guess my contribution to this is just the observation that what you think is worth talking about and what you think can be ignored is the essence of culture war. Or, put more simply, the culture war is the debate over our unstated and unexamined assumptions about right and wrong, and its hard for us to even realize this is what we're doing in the moment because we're blinded by the emotional flares of the object-level debate.
Ironically, sanewashing the women who post about wanting to kill their own kids like this risks stigmatizing mental illness more. Psychotic people usually don't become murderers. Depressed mothers usually don't kill their kids. But trying to normalize it make it seem like this is the common course of the illness. Like post partum depression is something that takes over your body and uses it to kill kids.
If so, can any mother with PPD be allowed custody of her kids? If your family member has occasional psychotic breaks, can you ever allow them within vicinity of your children? Or yourself? If the illness is this uncontrollable and leads to such terrible outcomes, then surely anyone exhibiting symptoms should be committed to 24/7 care at a psych ward, as mothers with PPD are simply not in control of themself.
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.
Oh, I did not know that was the case. I assumed that, since people are blaming the father and a lack of medical care, that the defense must be blaming some chronic condition. So I just assumed that post partum depression could somehow cause psychosis without looking further into it.
If it was a sudden onset emergency that could not have been foreseen, that changes thing. But then I don't really understand the rhetoric around it.
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.
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