The Lindsay Clancy Case: What We’re Missing About Postpartum Mental Health

So if you are not familiar with the Lindsay Clancy story, there's currently a trial right now.

Lindsay Clancy was a mom of three children, ages five, three and eight months old.

So she had spent five years having babies, which we know is a big hormonal event each time.

And then she experienced postpartum depression, eventually progressing into postpartum psychosis, eventually leading to hallucinations, which then led to her children, all three of them dying at her hands and then her committing suicide.

So there is a lot happening in the social media space around this trial.

This event happened in 2023.

The trial is currently happening now.

It's actually something that I personally was kind of surprised they took to the prosecution in this way so they didn't have to quote-unquote trial this case and especially not trial it in this way because the defense of psychosis and insanity gave the option for there to be essentially the and you guys let me just let me preface us that i i I'm not a legal system connoisseur, okay? So I'm going to like give context and explain, but I might not be 100% right or correct on these things.

But I do want to still have this conversation because it's going to relate so closely with hormones, minerals, postpartum.

anxiety, depression, like so many of the things that, and even the medical system and the way healthcare is administered to people and all of these things I have such a vested interest in.

I really wanted to talk about this too, just with my unique background as a pharmacist and even my training along pharmacogenetics, which is where we can use a genetic scan to predict to the best of our ability, make better, more well-educated guesses on how somebody would respond to a certain medication and which medication side effect profiles would be more apparent in someone.

So who would have more side effects versus who wouldn't? And so anyways, what was surprising to me was that I believe there was a way that this wouldn't be trialed as a traditional criminal case, but that she could be mandated to a mental hospital institution, basically institutionalized as a sentence that didn't necessarily have to go through a...

I think it still would have been a jury-based trial, but I think it would have been different.

So with that, the...

there is debate over whether she was actually experiencing postpartum depression whether she was actually experiencing postpartum psychosis and what i am seeing from the prosecution side that is prosecuting her saying like hey no this wasn't actually the case she should be held criminally liable because she was in her right state of mind when she made the choices to do these actions and the case for that the case against that is her defense which is saying hey no she was not in her right state of mind she was not in control of what was happening in her body because her mind was fitting the definition of insanity because she was being over prescribed medications she had active medication prescriptions for 13 different medications again i think I might be slightly off on these numbers, okay? But that is kind of the premise of this case is you have one side saying like, nope, she actually was fine that day.

And then you have another side saying like, no, she was in the depths of severe insomnia, depression, anxiety, postpartum psychosis, suicidal thoughts and ideations, hallucinations, etc., and so as i've been like having conversations with people around this and and even if you're like on social media or you see tick tock there's a couple different things that have now happened so this is a great oh my gosh i don't even want to use the word great because this is what this is an insanely tragic situation Just like so heartbreaking and heart wrenching.