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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   14256 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026

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I realize this isn’t a top quality post, so I accept the judgement of the mods, but a mistrial has been declared in the case of Lindsay Clancy. Shes the woman in Massachusetts who admitted to killing her kids, but claims she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.

The jury deliberated for seven days. Apparently, it came down to one male juror holding out against the other (nine female, two male) jurors. The belief is that he wanted to vote guilty. The jury reported to the judge that the holdout refused to follow the law regarding reasonable doubt, and the defense tried to have him removed. The judge refused. This morning, the judge declared a mistrial but gave defense one hour to get a stay from the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.

Predictably, the online discourse is off the walls. X lifts the holdout up as a hero, while Reddit believes he (we know it’s a male because the defense said so) is an MRA/red piller and needs to have his phone searched.

Personally, I think she’s guilty of premeditated, cold blooded murder. That said, I get the postpartum argument, but am horrified by the defense of her and holding her up as some kind of hero.

Some thoughts as I've been forced to learn much more about this case than I've wanted to know:

-A common response to the media conversation around this case is to criticize women for brainless takes that do not engage with the information about the case or expert commentary. This includes me, I've been frustrated.

-It seems like actual experts in this field are landing on a psychotic process (most likely postpartum psychosis) as the explanation of events. That is to say she is legitimately not guilty by reason of insanity. This moved the needle for me. How can I criticize women for being retarded and not listening to actual information if I don't listen to experts and people with specific knowledge of the case.

-As a legal matter, it sounds like the expectation from knowledgable parties has been a hung jury or not guilty by reason of insanity because of structural, jurisdiction specific aspects of this type of defense in MA.

-I don't know how easy it will be to parse this without a medical background, but for a relevant podcast by a forensic psychiatrist you can search on YouTube " Lindsay Clancy Trial: Forensic Psychiatrist Explains Psychosis, Malingering, & Insanity Defense."

-Incidentally I strongly suspect one or both of the hosts of that podcast are Rationalist/Scott diaspora types, so if you are reading this: loved the metal gear reference.

Just to add to this: there are not an insignificant number of people in psychiatry who seem to believe that crime is per se evidence of mental issues (ie normal people don’t murder their kids). That is, they are predisposed to thinking there must be a mental issue here.

But i think the gods of the copybook heading win against the “crime is mental issue” argument.

Anti-social personality disorder is a common cause of crime and presents no protection from consequences of that crime.

The majority of crime is driven by mental illness but that does not mean it is accused. Just because you robbed the store to buy drugs doesn't mean you should get away with it.

But i think the gods of the copybook heading win against the “crime is mental issue” argument.

Why? If anything letting women like her kill their kids will eliminate such women from the gene pool.

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Given what we know about the state of psychology (ie a lot of bunk science) I don’t really give two shits what it’s “experts” think.

This a psychiatric (medical) matter not a psychological one.

Even if it was just psychology.....plenty of parts of the field have evidence base and predict the world. Some parts don't.

Do you feel qualified to assess if this specific thing is something that has well validated data or not?

One can look at the sweep of psychiatric theories over the last 100 years and find the field wanting. And bad science. Tons of bad science.

Can you point to something in the last 40 years that is clear and obvious bad science or a bad psychiatric theory?

  • recovered/repressed-memory therapy movement and its satanic-ritual-abuse offshoot of the late 1980s and 1990s
  • Study 329 (paroxetine in teens) and Turner et al. (2008)

These are probably more mixed examples than you'd think. To my understanding repressed memory theory was a longstanding vestigium from the old days of psychiatry, once the field became more scientific, medicine got more tools, and we learned how memory worked it did get deprecated. This is science working as we'd hope with people making adjustment when more data is available. As you note it did take awhile.

This specific issue (especially on the satantic panic end) and the transgenderism issue that someone else posted are also examples of medical authority being coopted for politics, which is a problem, a known fail state, probably most famously known in COVID but also famously a problem in authoritarian states (ex: Sluggish Schizophrenia). This is absolutely a fair criticism but isn't a reason to toss out the whole thing.

The SSRI studies are part of a wider conversation which is complicated and confusing and hard to summarize here.

There are fads despite whatever the current 'evidence-based' approach is. The Trans thing is a recent one to have gone political.

The homosexuals protested until they were removed from the DSM, but that was outside the 40 year window you set.

How secure are all the diagnosis of ADD / ADHD in active boys?

Michelle Remembers by psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder was published in 1980. How far back are the longstanding vestigium from the old days of psychiatry?

Do you remember all the dissociative identity disorder diagnoses, DID in the '90's? Previously rare suddenly tens of thousands.

Throw out the whole thing, maybe not. It's not like we've better solutions. But increased circumspection and less deference. Especially in medico-legal areas. This is how Constance Fisher murdered 3 children in 1954 and then 3 more in 1967.

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Transgenderism. See the cass report on the outcomes.

I would normally (heh normal) pay attention to the psychosis, but there is a lot of hard evidence from the phone around the kiddy stangling time and the husband phone call. Psychosis doesn't let you conveniently rationality yourself in a 'just so' way that works in your interest.

Psychosis doesn't let you conveniently rationality yourself in a 'just so' way that works in your interest.

Why not? How many psychotic people have you interacted with deeply? Disorganization is a common symptom but not required, and people's brains are excellent at post-hoc rationalization and justification, especially when oscillating in and out of psychosis as appears to be case here.

Because that’s not what psychosis is. It’s a break with reality. It’s believing untrue things, it’s not being in control of your actions and reactions. That’s how most mental illness works. You cannot turn it on and off. You can’t be rational on demand.

One of the things that changed my view on this is that I learned that a known (and incredibly dangerous) presentation of PPP in the literature is the waxing and waning presentation that would have explained LC's action.

To some extent it makes sense given our suspicion of the mechanism (and in contrast with normal schizophrenia etc).

Waxing and waiting is one thing. But she was capable of appearing perfectly fine in most situations and especially when waxing presentation would embarrass her, interfere in her plans, or cost her professional career. That seems a bigger ask. If she has a very obvious episode in the pick up line at kindergarten, then is fine an hour later, maybe. If she says something crazy in public or acts out in public at night and is okay the next morning, maybe. But AFAICT, she doesn’t have public episodes, outbursts, or odd behaviors. She is fine in public. She is fine on social media. She isn’t texting her contacts about the demon in the basement or something. She doesn’t even have episodes in the doctors offices. A person might be able to hold themselves together for a time, but it would be impossible to be consistent in hiding the illness that well from all of her social connections. Like she doesn’t even act out in the grocery store that im aware of. She’s either not ill, or she has the best control of her mental state of anyone out there.

I hear you that it looks weird, this is why initially I was team "she did it for some other reason" but when people I know and trust who have more expertise than me stake their reputations professionally (Resnick) and didactically (the podcast I linked) then you gotta have a think.

But how can she be both rational and irrational at the same time? You talk about waxing and waning which seems like one can get into fits and then get out of fits; how can one be in both at the same time?

Do you think that psychosis will eventuate and dissipate around a lucid moment? Around the body of the facts presented in this case from the career subject matter expert psychiatrists?

If it does would you accord this to a man that murder suicides his wife and children? The car cliff divers for instance?

Do you believe women have agency in the most extreme emotional situations under the influence of prescribed medication, and would you accord a similar agency to men in the same circumstance?

Do you believe women have agency in the most extreme emotional situations under the influence of prescribed medication, and would you accord a similar agency to men in the same circumstance?

This is the kind of question that reveals fundamental misunderstanding in how the law functions, emotional extremis is completely unrelated to postpartum psychosis and is unrelated to NGRI findings.

However, the fact remains that this was, fundamentally, the question asked of the jurors.

I think the question they were asked was "did the state prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she was not mentally impaired* during the killings."

The state was never going to be able to do that the law in MA is ridiculous.

Insofar as this is true, it's another compelling argument against the existence of the insanity defense.

i guess from the economics perspective of law if you are prone to committing acts that have huge negative utility to others due to lapses of sanity then there is a good chance that the state strongly punishing such acts could be efficient. for example if you were aware of such punishments then the insane while they are rational could carry out actions that reduce the risk of them committing bad acts while they are insane. kind of like how Odysseus ties himself to the mast. i believe the law already punishes people who are in a non-pure state due to drugs or alcohol this is not so much different.

The insanity defense should be trivially deemed appropriate - do you want to send your grandmother to jail because she has a UTI and attacks her nurse while in the ICU? No, she doesn't know what's going on, doesn't know what she is doing, and doesn't know if it's right or wrong.

The insanity defense is a very specific thing with a specific definition that doesn't do what people think it does.

The insanity defense should be trivially deemed appropriate - do you want to send your grandmother to jail because she has a UTI and attacks her nurse while in the ICU?

Jail? No, but the normal punishment for this act, for otherwise law-abiding people, would probably be a fine and probation, which seems completely reasonable. If my grandmother murdered an ICU nurse, even while completely loopy, I would still think that justice would demand punishment. I'm pretty sure that if I murdered someone during a psychotic break, I would not contest the charge and leave it to the judge to determine what punishment is appropriate for those circumstances.

I agree with the other poster that I strongly dislike the insanity defense in any form, and would much rather rely on the discretion of prosecution, the conscience of juries, and the reasoning of the sentencing judges to administer justice.

Bring back exile as form of punishment. This is to a point what Scandinavian prisons are. Importantly, you don't need to refrain from calling mass murderers or gang members (those who intended to wage civil war on their community) "evil"- you can still have PMITA prisons for them.

What trials are meant to do is therefore to determine "evil" (in the Before Times this was prosecuted with death; now it's life in prison, which is a death that you can be partially revived from if we determine later we fucked up- even El Salvador treats people who outright wage war on the community that mercifully). This is why you separate first and second degree murder (and manslaughter), too- so we see that "evil" is not even that they killed, but because they lay in wait to do it.

You don't need to be penned in like cattle in these [cities of] asylum. But the trust was broken, so you can't live around everyone else, and now you have to go to that reserve (and if you leave you will be killed, obviously).

I would still think that justice would demand punishment.

Why? Just put her somewhere secure and admit it's because you're scared, not because it's justice when you degrade her life but it's immoral when she does it to you.

Would it reassure you to know that you can have schizophrenia, murder people because the moon goblins told you to, and still be found guilty (and therefore the insanity defense isn't applicable)?

Why would it? Would it reassure you to know that you can play Russian Roulette and survive without any injury at all?

Because most people's model of what the insanity defense means don't accurately reflect the case law.

It applies only to a very small subset of crimes complicated by mental illness, and generally does not lead to any increased freedom in the community or getting away with it.

Sure, because you're supposed to not listen to the moon goblins. If the disease makes you believe the moon goblins are the source of moral truth, however, the defense does apply.

Right, I've personally interacted with convicts who said something like "yes I knew it was wrong but the moon goblins told me to" and it's like nope you knew it was wrong, to prison with you.

It seems to me part of the moral justification of the insanity defense in the granny case is that she is an otherwise decent person who is temporarily not herself (using colloquial terminology). In this case, fixing the UTI makes her herself and punishing her for her actions under its influence seems unjust to me.

When I look at cases where it’s not curable is when I think the morality shifts for me. If the grandmother has incurable dementia, I still think she deserves mercy albeit under confinement/treatment. If it’s some homeless dude who is permanently loopy, I’m happy throwing the book at him and just punishing him.

My own morally intuitions collapse to the questions of: is it curable and who/whom. I suspect it’s similar for many folks.

So this is starting to pick at things a bit (in a good way!).

In the case of LC the defense would argue that she is an otherwise decent person who is temporarily not herself, fixing the psychosis brings her back to her healthy baseline and returns her to a safe and productive member of the community, furthermore they would argue that it's not her fault for a variety of reasons (this isn't a chronic person who really needs to understand that they should take their medicines, this is someone new to the experience, also her doctors should have caught stuff).

A separate part of this is restoration and what to do when NGRI is determined. Quite often the outcome is that someone gets dumped into a psych hospital for 30+ years or even an entire lifetime. That's not much different or better than prison.

NO this is an argument for prosecutorial discretion or 'not pressing charges', insanity defense is a concept that exists inside of a jury trial or at least a plea deal.

you're conflating a solution to a different problem.

If charged granny would justifiably be able to say she was not in her usual state of health (medical or psychiatric), did not know what was real or was not real (psychosis), did not have capacity, and did not know what was right or wrong.

We choose not to press charges because yes that's a waste of resources, but the same fundamentals apply. She's not guilty by reason of mental health. The restoration of capacity is straightforward in that case but it can be in others also.

No it’s not the same fundamentals -

The argument was that insanity should not be a defense and your example was of a scenario where charges shouldn’t be pressed.

You can remove insanity ad a defense and not have to charge every person having a small episode

The reason charges shouldn't be pressed (against granny) is because the person doesn't understand what was happening and why it was wrong.

That's the same reason charges shouldn't be pressed in patient's who have a valid insanity defense. They don't understand what is happening and why it was wrong.

-It seems like actual experts in this field are landing on a psychotic process (most likely postpartum psychosis) as the explanation of events. That is to say she is legitimately not guilty by reason of insanity. This moved the needle for me. How can I criticize women for being retarded and not listening to actual information if I don't listen to experts and people with specific knowledge of the case.

What's the expert explanation for her preparing for the act by sending the husband away for chores, and even biding her time by calmly picking up the phone whem he called?

While it is common for people with mental illness this severe to be grossly disorganized (think homeless guy wandering around mumbling to himself) it is not required. People who don't understand what is real, what is happening, and what is right/wrong can engaged in organized behavior to accomplish psychotic goals.

That's what makes this shit scary.

See: Charles Whitman

I thought that the idea behind "not guilty by reason of insanity" is that the culprit was in a state where they had either no control of their own actions, or were unable to tell their actions were wrong, and so can't be held liable. Having a mind organized enough that you're capable of planning, and being aware of the necessity to hide them, seem to strike at both of these assumptions. Even if there is a form of psychosis that works like this, I'm having trouble seeing the justification for a "not guilty" verdict.

To some extent this gets into the territory of highly jurisdictional stuff (and individual physician interpretation - the law is fuzzier than you might imagine), but as an example:

The voices told me to kill my family and I did it but I knew that wasn't the right thing and couldn't help myself = guilty.

The voices told me to kill my family and I did it because if the voices told me to do it must be the right thing to do = NGRI.

The latter is less common than you'd think. For instance a lot of violent voice are labeled as demons, bullies, and other such things and when assessed patients will say "yeah I knew I shouldn't have listened to Satan because he's Satan."

I'm not really sure if this is a sensible line to draw but it seems to be where it is drawn a lot of the time.

A case like Charles Whitman is probably optimal to think about because his thinking is otherwise totally clear but his violence button was stuck on because of the brain tumor.

Organized and able to plan AND also untethered from reality is thankfully extremely rare, but it does happen, the intuition that it doesn't make sense is more from lack of being common than actual possibility.

I'd say most people this sick are totally disorganized, uselessly impulsive, or both. But not all.

The voices told me to kill my family and I did it but I knew that wasn't the right thing and couldn't help myself = guilty.

The voices told me to kill my family and I did it because if the voices told me to do it must be the right thing to do = NGRI.

That's what I assumed, and my argument is that we are in the former scenario, implied by Clancy attempting to hide her actions. Of course, if the state operates under a different framework than the argument does not apply.

In other words, the only thing that makes this psychosis is that she wanted to kill her kids? Then what distinguishes her 'psychosis' from any other criminal's desire to do evil? If I killed someone in a crime of passion, what stops me from claiming it was a temporary 'psychosis'? I really can't see the distinction here.

It's a complicated construct but if you pick at it makes more sense. There isn't a rational reason to do this in the way she did. Most people just leave their kids or abandon them. Maybe you frame the husband. She slowly and intimately slaughtered her children making no effort to protect herself from the ramifications of her actions and with no clear gain (see: serial killers and sexual gratification, sicarios and money and fame).

This strongly points to something like altruistic filicide. She thought they were better off dead and that it was the right thing to do. That's pure madness.

In the case of a crime of passion you know what you were doing is wrong, if you try and pretend you were briefly randomly psychotic you'll get "by what mechanism" "oh so you chose to do drugs knowing that drugs are illegal and bad."

The crime to some extent does point to madness being an explainer.

In the case of a crime of passion you know what you were doing is wrong, if you try and pretend you were briefly randomly psychotic you'll get "by what mechanism" "oh so you chose to do drugs knowing that drugs are illegal and bad."

Except these days it's trivial to get prescribed drugs from a doctor, which you can then use as an excuse.

I'm more open to the psychosis explanation than most people here, but I feel like "the experts" are on shaky ground on the issue, and are pulling a "trust me, bro".

The experts in this case (both testifying and misc. people commenting) are essentially the people in the legal system/healthcare whose specific job is to tell if people are full of shit. The field has well developed and researched things like forensic inventories that are designed to catch people who exaggerate or mislead about their symptoms. These tools are not readily available online for the obvious reasons, but to give an example of the kind of thing you would do - if someone is pretending to have cognitive deficits to avoid blame you can ask them a question that even someone with severe retardation or dementia can answer like "what's 2+2." Anyone who can't answer that is going to be highly suspicious. The actual assessment is going to be a much more robust and complicated elaboration on that sort of concept.

It's also going to involve actual exposure to similar cases, knowledge of the criminal profiles involved (what does narcissistic family annihilation actually look, how does it contrast with borderline, suicidal, and so on).

The field has some limitations of course but doctors are doing this every day all over the country and it works fine and is a standard part of the legal system.

How many murderers have you actually met? I've treated hundreds and I'm not even a forensic psychiatrist - and even with that caveat I could guess the type of crime sometimes from doing my unrelated business. Resnick has probably evaluated 1,000s of killers and he's made a career out of sorting them and even wrote the book on it.

I'm not 100% convinced of the argument but I do have enough information to understand that expertise can exist on these matters and I'm seeing a bunch line up in a certain way...

The field has some limitations of course but doctors are doing this every day all over the country and it works fine and is a standard part of the legal system.

You can say the same thing about transgender healthcare, that doesn't mean it rests on sound assumptions. Everything you said here only reinforces my impression that this is more of an art than a science, and the whole thing is based on trust, which I don't have a lot to spare at the moment.

if someone is pretending to have cognitive deficits to avoid blame you can ask them a question that even someone with severe retardation or dementia can answer like "what's 2+2." Anyone who can't answer that is going to be highly suspicious.

This in particular sounds like the whole thing rests on "the experts" having 20-30 IQ points on the people they're investigating, and being reasonably confident they'll be doing the manipulating, rather than being manipulated. I don't think that's a reasonable assumption here, and I'm really not seeing anything that's supposed to catch this case in particular.

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I've not paid close attention to the trial but surely she could possess a rational rage toward her children for dashing her hopes and dreams of being an international superstar, superspy, or some other path incompatible with being a responsible mother of three.

Absolutely but what do people with those types of feelings do? They lash out impulsively crashing their car. They grab a weapon at hand and do something. Most commonly they attack the husband.

The mixture of poor/irrational planning and premeditation supposedly leans towards this kind of pathology.

She "gains" the ability to die knowing no one will be able to take care of her children better than she did, and they will never love someone else more than her.

I do think she's mad, you don't kill your kids and try to kill yourself because you're mentally well, but being unwell enough to think your kids are better off dead isn't the same as not knowing that killing them is illegal, which is what the insanity defense is meant to cover.

This is true but you've already narrowed the solution space down quite a bit once you are talking about this from every motivation in the world to a much smaller subset with a higher percentage of possible explanations involving type of illness the insanity defense applies to.

Then what distinguishes her 'psychosis' from any other criminal's desire to do evil?

Your question answers itself (emphasis mine).

How can I criticize women for being retarded and not listening to actual information if I don't listen to experts and people with specific knowledge of the case.

Probably because experts had spent 20+ years of burning the trust that they had built (not that expert witnesses deserve any goodwill at all, they are as sincere as prostitute having orgasm with a john). Also what ratio of said experts could be classified as woke?

For all the things that "woke" did, it frustrates me that "CSI is garbage science" wasn't one of them. TV shows gives unrealistic expectations, and the actual forensic science has longstanding, real concerns about accuracy in certain not-uncommon uses (bite marks, splatter patterns). AFAIK DNA and fingerprints are fairly robust, though.

You should be glad "woke" didn’t make that their thing; the pattern of the post-woke right suggests that the baby would have been thrown out with the bathwater as everything was made a partisan issue.

Assuming experts are wrong without any investigation is even worse mental hygiene than assuming they are right without any investigation, and is a massively common intellectual failure in certain communities including our own.

Yes, expert witnesses are paid to support a side during the trial, but that doesn't mean that all expert witnesses are equally credible. Some expert witnesses wrote the textbook. Some expert witnesses evaluated the Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh. Some are random fillers. Guess which the Clancy defense team got?

Likewise experts in the field may in fact not be involved in the case at all and taking a stance, as in my link.

Lastly - I hate woke and see it everywhere, but Jesus you can't reach to it for everything. Forensic physicians are some of the least woke people around for obvious reasons.

Assuming experts are wrong without any investigation is even worse mental hygiene than assuming they are right without any investigation, and is a massively common intellectual failure in certain communities including our own.

That's not what's happening here, though. People are noticing that expert opinions disagree with their own judgment and deciding that the fact that the opinions come from "experts" doesn't override their judgment, because they value the "expert" opinion no more than that of a layman. It's not assuming that they're wrong, it's using the conclusion that they lack expertise in what they claim to be experts, which might be correct or incorrect, but certainly eminently reasonable when it comes to anything around psychology in 2026.

To claim that "expert opinion" should sway your opinion either way is assuming that they are (more) right (than a layman) without any investigation. To not let it sway your opinion and simply disagree when their opinion disagrees with yours isn't assuming they are wrong, no more than it's assuming any layman is wrong if you don't let a layman's opinion on something convince you.

Judgement requires discernment. Most of the opinions on this case I see here and elsewhere are unwarranted opinions generally without any specific information about this case or information on how mental health or insanity pleas work in general.

It is the same level of zero effort opinion put forth by the women on social media who say that the husband did it "because he just looked like he did it okay." Prettying it up by appealing to anger at doctors for covid or wokeness doesn't change the fact that much of the ink spilled on this is uninformed and is absent any specific or general knowledge.

The number of times I've seen people mix together psychology and psychiatry, or argue that somehow this case was going to excuse women from murder charges because of natural hormone variations is unreal. Very basic misunderstandings of facts should be a sign to step back and ask questions.

I'm not seeing a lot of that.

OK, so maybe everyone's judgment about this trial here is bad, exactly as bad as Clancy's supporters. I don't see anywhere in what I wrote that would conflict with that at all. This doesn't change the fact that it's entirely reasonable to conclude that "expert opinions" in this case is no more valuable than one's own judgment. Whatever lack of discernment that anyone here (or anywhere) has, given the current state of psychology and experts thereof, it'd be entirely reasonable to conclude that those experts' opinions are corrupted or biased or incomplete or just plain wrong to a similar extent, i.e. like any non-expert layman's.

If you reframe this discussion as "I, a person who is not an aerospace engineer, is disagreeing with the findings of aerospace engineers who have no financial incentive and the inventor of the airplane, who happens to be hired by the defense" that is an accurate enough presentation.

It also makes the commentary look stupid.

I don't know what your job is, but imagine you are explaining something about your job and a used car salesman slams in like Kanye and goes ima let you finish but you are totally wrong.

That also sounds pretty stupid, no?

who have no financial incentive

Aren't expert witnesses usually paid?

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If you reframe this discussion as "I, a person who is not an aerospace engineer, is disagreeing with the findings of aerospace engineers who have no financial incentive and the inventor of the airplane, who happens to be hired by the defense" that is an accurate enough presentation.

This is a terrible analogy, and I think you're smart enough to know it. Let's use an analogy that's more akin to psychology:

If you reframe this discussion as "I, a person who is not a homeopathy researcher, is disagreeing with the findings of homeopathy researchers who have no financial incentive and the inventor of homeopathic therapies, who happens to be hired by the defense (presumably regarding some dispute about homeopathic therapy)" that is an accurate enough presentation.

The difference between aerospace engineering and homeopathy/psychology is that the former has loads of empirical evidence and concrete track record of success as detectable and measurable by a layman in everyday life, while the latter 2 not only lack empirical evidence but often go directly against it.

If you want to claim that modern psychology as practiced by modern psychologists has as much credibility as modern aerospace engineering as practiced by modern aerospace engineers, then just say that. That can be an interesting venue of conversation, where people can discuss the various details and specifics of what gives these people credibility or doesn't. But just making some vague statement about "expert opinions" and "assuming" they're wrong (again, no such thing happened) looks like you're just trying to smuggle in a bailey via a motte.

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Out of all the medical fields, psychology is probably one of the most wishy-washy ones. There is a good underlying question.
Can women be convicted of anything once a month, postpartum, in perimenopause... ?

Could a hypothetical transwoman or transman with no apparent mental illness, diagnosis, psych ward visits on record, etc, claim the insanity defense based on their injection or unusual fluctuation of crazy-inducing female hormones?

So much of this is based off of misunderstandings and this is why I get so tremendously frustrated with people here.

Psychology is not a medical field. Psychiatry is. Large chunks of psychiatry are functionally psychology, large chunks are not and have just as good or bad of an evidence base as the rest of medicine. Usually people here complaining about medicine and psychiatry don't seem to realize that everyone involved has a very good understanding of what has firm and shaky evidence and so on. Psychiatry also is the victim of long running smear campaigns by august institutions like Scientology and individuals who literally have the inability to acknowledge they have an illness even as the voices tell them to kill their family.

With respect to the specific issue at hand only part of this is medical at all, a large chunk of it is multi-century long discussions in the fields of law, politics, and ethics about how governance, criminality, and the law work. Coming into an intellectual tradition of some of the wisest and smartest people who have ever lived trying to figure out how to organize society and going "IDK insanity defense is bad" is profoundly ill advised.

Yes screeching women on TikTok are making weird arguments but none of the actual knowledge holders or decisions makers are trying to excuse women from committing crimes because they are on their periods. This is a profound misunderstanding of the issue at hand.

You can get a serious, permanent mental illness (ex: schizophrenia) from menopause, you can kill someone because of that illness, and you can still be held criminally liable.

People are just pouncing on preexisting biases without any understanding of how this works.

I think there are a lot of problems in the field. Over diagnosis of disorders and over medication are perennial concerns in psychiatry and psychology. Psychology, upon which psychiatry is based has a replication problem meaning that most results are never subjected to scrutiny. Given these problems, I don’t think it reasonable to simply nod along to what psychiatry says without bothering to do something as crazy as read the evidence.

I have no objection to people attempting to evaluate for themselves the persuasiveness of the arguments, the research, the literature, and so on. It is very common here and elsewhere for people to just go "no fuck you they must be woke and im mad about covid" which is the exact level of analysis exhibited by the "he did it cause he's a gemini" people.

Psychiatry is fundamental a medical field which means that inter rater reliability, effect size, and so on are baked in and seriously researched. They do have some problems but most of that is structural (ex: SSRIs clearly work, why does the literature not show that to some extent?...well medical research is hard).

While medical research has all kinds of problems the stance here is comically overblown.

For instance most of the over-dx problems make sense in context (for instance giving people labels so they can get insurance coverage for therapy, scummy patients/doctors in the ADHD market, and so on).

SSRIs do not clearly work. That is, it is far from clear the benefit outweighs the harms. There has been little studies on long term SSRI usage despite SSRIs being highly addictive (ie trials were measured in terms of weeks; not years).

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I noticed that you conveniently ignored my question related to the highly scientific qualification of transgenderism as mentally sound by competent psychology experts.

There are plenty of competent people in Psychiatry and plenty in Psychology as well. By your own admission, these bright, competent, highly-educated experts may spend up to 2 weeks a year in training meant to erase racial or sexist biases that their lying eyes have implanted in them.
Very few of them ever complain about this state of affair, or under the cover of pseudo-anonymity on such platforms.
The ones that do, once in a while, point out that the emperor is naked, end up in big trouble with both their own regulation agencies and the government, as was demonstrated between say 2020 and 2023.

They may have very good understanding of what has firm and shaky evidence, but they are not always compelled to share that understanding with the wider public, and sometimes, perhaps, they disguise it in favor of what their Masters ask them to.

With respect to the specific issue at hand only part of this is medical at all, a large chunk of it is multi-century long discussions in the fields of law, politics, and ethics about how governance, criminality, and the law work. Coming into an intellectual tradition of some of the wisest and smartest people who have ever lived trying to figure out how to organize society and going "IDK insanity defense is bad" is profoundly ill advised.

Or maybe going 'IDK maybe black people are just as smart people?' Oh that's not ill-advised, that's just uh socially-acceptable.
Now, what was socially-acceptable way back when experts were still respected? One of the fathers of modern neurology, Jean-Martin Charcot was all about hysteria, you know the 'b# be crazy, yo' disease. Why'd we give up on that again?
Same profoundly scientific reason that the threshold for mental retardation was lowered to 70 in the 70s to conveniently not have half of the African-American population qualify as mentally retarded?

I didn't bring up transgenderism because it's not relevant. Medicine has blindspots just like everyone else does. Blindspots aren't the same as blindness.

Starting by blaming politics/wokeness/feminism/whatever is retarded. Investigate first then blame PRN. Sometimes a blindspot is pumped in Pharma money, but you can't just assume all drugs were only approved because of Pharma. That's stupid.

Insanity pleas are part of a long running attempt at codifying criminal responsibility that has been argued about through many waves of predominant social ideologies.

Also hysteria doesn't work the way you think it does, and bringing it up is a feminist complaint anyway?

Medicine has blindspots just like everyone else does. Blindspots aren't the same as blindness.

How many blindspots should the common man assume that the experts have? Would an expert know how many blindspots they have themselves?

Starting by blaming politics/wokeness/feminism/whatever is retarded.

It's a good starting point when examining anything coming out of academia after the Long March through the Institutions.
Experts have been telling us that they are activists, that they are biased, that not being biased in the same way they are is against Science, etc. We are listening to the experts.
Who do you trust more to keep a secret in confidence, the guy with a rainbow or the one who drops the nword in front of you?

Also hysteria doesn't work the way you think it does, and bringing it up is a feminist complaint anyway?

I probably don't have a good understanding of hysteria and other mental issues that have been credited or discredited in history in accordance with political, cultural or social changes.

The number of times I've seen people mix together psychology and psychiatry, or argue that somehow this case was going to excuse women from murder charges because of natural hormone variations is unreal.

Why not? Women are already excused from murder charges for their prepartum condition, they call it 'reproductive healthcare'.
Why should this new cultural development not end up like the previous cultural developments, such as the 'sex change' or 'soul mixed up at birth' lunacy?
What makes you confident that this slope is not that slippery?

The definition of "fitness to stand trial" is defined by law, not by psychiatrists; tossing this standard aside to give carte blanche to psychiatry - who's guild has publicaly announced opposition to the death penalty, btw - is rank injustice.

Yes, the "experts" are wrong, and in fact they are proud to be so.

My intake of the details of the case has led me to believe in the insanity defense.

That being said, my intake of the widespread support Clancy has received from women has also led me to believe in an insanity defense against a large percentage of politically active women.

My intake of the details of the case has led me to believe in the insanity defense.

As I said elsewhere the insanity defense is a very specific thing that doesn't mean what people think it does.

As I mentioned on Twitter, people pleading "beyond a reasonable doubt" clearly have no clue what it means. If this case doesn't clear the hurdle of then it is literally impossible for any case, short of the defendent literally taking the stand and telling the Court "Yo, I'm actually perfectly fine, I'm just pleading Insanity because I know it's a Get Out of Jail Free Card. Blow me." and any defense attorney in MA not pleading insanity is guilty of professional negligence.

Issues with the specific legal framework in MA may in fact be valid and reasonable but are not the responsibility of physicians, psychiatrists, or Lindsay Clancy.

The law, as you describe it, is so transparently absurd that it renders itself moot. No case will actually be decided by any such law, since evidence can be arbitrarily interpreted any which way a jury intuits. It simply amounts to asking the jury whether they feel like the defendant is a bad person that they want to punish.

I'm not sure I see how that follows.

Yes, that's the impression I am getting, and it's true for both sides. It feels like a loss for a lot of people if she is found not guilty. That feeling is exacerbated by the pink-wearing banshees outside the courthouse. On the other hand, it will feel like a win for her staunch supporters. More broadly though, I think more people will see these supporters as the real societal problem that needs to be addressed.

I think, no matter what happens, this will just continue to add to the general schism between men and women. Men are starting to develop some of the same in-group bias that women have always had.

More broadly though, I think more people will see these supporters as the real societal problem that needs to be addressed.

Yeah toxic positivity, female in-group bias and her mentality as well as social media are really making a large slice of women into intellectual zombies. I'd hazard that lots of men have always been this way but they've tended to go into a variety of directions which limits social disruption. Since the current epidemic in women functions as a voting bloc it causes...problems.

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