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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.
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?
Aren't expert witnesses usually paid?
My initial post mentioned how both expert witnesses and general experts (with no incentive) seem to be mostly lining up in support of the defense's narrative.
This was a shock to me and part of why I changed my view.
Also keep in mind, as mentioned in my linked podcast - you can hire an expert witnesses and pay them and have them generate work product you do not want. It happens.
Resnick absolutely could have seen Clancy, been paid, and been like nah you don't want me to testify. Instead he helped the defense.
From this guy's bio:
"He has provided consultation in many high profile cases including: Jeffrey Dahmer, Susan Smith, Timothy McVeigh, Andrea Yates, Scott Petersen, Brian Mitchell (kidnapper of Elizabeth Smart), Theodore Kaczynski (Unabomber) and Casey Anthony."
There's a reason I'm so pissy on this topic.
I don't doubt Resnick can evaluate whether a woman sitting in front of him was suffering from post-partum psychosis or not, but I'm sceptical he can tell if a woman whose had months to start building an insanity plea legal defense was suffering from post-partum psychosis or just post-partum depression several months ago, based on her testimony alone. I'm not sure anyone has that ability, that's practically mind reading.
If he'd seen Clancy before she killed her children or right afterwards I'd put more weight on his evaluation. As far as I understand the medical professionals that did evaluate her at the time made no indication that she heard voices.
I'd recommend you watch the podcast if you are legitimately interested in hearing the argument and are potential open to having your view changed.
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What even is the point of a trial (or a defense at a trial) aside from generating the biggest male ICK heard around the world?
What difference does it concretely make to be convicted of having been insane while killing your kids vs not really that insane for somebody who killed their kids?
Do the caretakers of her paraplegic body have a more favorable skin color or?
Wouldn't that mean you just need to get a different one or do you still have to make him testify if you paid for it?
At Resnick's level of prestige he gets to investigate, charge, and ask them if they want his conclusions (with a potential need to get someone else). It's absolutely possible he's gone senile or decided to collect one last case or get some money for his grandkids. It's more likely that he's involved because it's a big case and he found what he found.
In a more normal case you are just as likely to have the witnesses conclusion change the defense's tack as to keep rolling the dice on witnesses until you get what you want.
And yes it's not clear if this is doing that much for Clancy, perhaps her defense sees a way out here, but realistically she's just likely to end up in a different kind of facility (with women's prison probably being better than the psychiatric hospital). Perhaps its safety concerns as she might get murdered in prison. Perhaps its just a desire to clear her name.
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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:
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.
I've banged the drum on this being medicine and psychiatry not psychology half a dozen times.
People who literally cannot define psychosis are saying "she's not psychotic and the result of this is that women will get away with murder because of their periods."
The analogy holds.
Medicine is a significant step down in reliability from aerospace engineering. Psychiatry even more so, again. Not to the level of homeopathy, not to the point where there are no successes, but both fields contain a lot of bad research.
Psychiatry is medicine, and it has the same problems - money and ethical concerns provide significant limitations in research over some scientific disciplines, but the problems are driven by tensions like that and the reality of research dealing with the most complex organism we have access to. Yes it's not pure math, but it's closer to that than homeopathy.
Aerospace as much as anything else has people publishing to avoid perishing and corner cutting because of finances, if we are going to take it that far.
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OK, well I see no prospect of any productive conversation with you on this topic, then. I'll only respond to your comments insomuch as to correct what I see as errors for third parties.
I mean I don't know what to say, the posts here involve a lot of demonstrably untrue statements and I've provided a link that provides education so that people can understand the various contexts and their is a large amount of outright refusal.
Assuming information is more incorrect because it comes from someone with information, training, and experience is obvious idiocy, but it does appear to be the stance you are advocating for.
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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).
SSRIs are one of the most commonly used medication types in the world, to my knowledge there is no reliable evidence of long term harms beyond the known side effects. The side effect profile is one of the best in psychiatric medicine, in fact we do use them despite the fact that they have less clinical effect because the harms are so low. Research on effect size does not generate enthusiasm but anyone who has actually prescribed knows they work just not for all patients. They are also not highly addictive. Some can generate a mostly mild withdrawal syndrome but some don't. Something that is highly addictive is Heroin. Heroin and Zoloft are not in the same category.
Addictive is the wrong word—they are very challenging to come off (especially if used for some time) and can create significant withdrawal issues.
And the side effects are quite bad
The majority of patients have no symptoms of discontinuation, and for those that do a simple taper is more than sufficient. Prozac self-tapers. Paxil is an exception but doesn't have any modern use cases. A different class of medication (SNRIs) cause "brain zaps" and are legitimately hard to get off of.
Side effects for the vast majority of patients consist of mild transient symptoms on initiation AND the more problematic side effect which is sexual side effects. This is relatively easy to treat if it's endorsed, or addressed by switching to another medication.
Very few patients have side effects while on steady use other than the sexual side effects.
Significant issues with SSRIs do occur with certain subtypes of patients, usually those are patients who have another type of issue (ex: Bipolar, Borderline) and don't need that kind of medication, or have predominately anxious phenotypes for which medication is significantly less reliable choice and are better treated with therapy.
They do have the black box warning for SI but I don't think any PCP or Psychiatrist I've ever talked to has observed it, it's probably not real and got stuck because of cautious regulators.
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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.
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?
How many blindspots should the common man assume that the experts have? Would an expert know how many blindspots they have themselves?
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?
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.
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?
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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.
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