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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.
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?
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.
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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