Episode 72
Lindsay Clancy, Postpartum Illness and Why We're Missing the Point
I miss my dad. You know that.
What you might not know is that he was a forensic psychiatrist for 55 years, I ran his practice for 10 of them, and on a case like Lindsay Clancy's, he's exactly who would've been called to testify. So for the last couple of weeks I've had his voice in my ear. Screaming.
Not about postpartum illness. That conversation is correct — women get sick after babies, they're scared to say so, they deserve better help. All of it, yes.
He'd be screaming because that's not what happened here.
Lindsay Clancy was diagnosed bipolar. That came out at trial. She was complaining of racing thoughts, worsening intrusive thoughts and no sleep, and somebody's answer was to increase her antidepressant — a thing that is documented to make bipolar patients worse. Her illness didn't make her psychotic. Her medication did. And if we don't separate "postpartum illness" from "shit-ass medical care," every woman who's already scared to disclose gets more scared.
I'm not a clinician. I say that about six times in this episode. This is his rant, from beyond the grave, delivered by the person who sat in the depositions.
Heads up: this one talks about postpartum mental illness, bipolar disorder, the Lindsay Clancy case (including the deaths of her children) and, briefly, suicide. Look after yourself.
If you're postpartum and struggling: Postpartum Support International, 1-800-944-4773.
If you're in crisis: call or text 988.
Transcript
I can hear him screaming about the conversations we're having about Lindsey
Speaker:Clancy right now, and how much we are absolutely missing the point, and
Speaker:that there are healthcare providers who should lose their licenses.
Speaker:There is an absolutely important conversation we need to have about
Speaker:postpartum illnesses, about what support in the postpartum period actually looks
Speaker:like, and about women who are scared to disclose the extent of their postpartum
Speaker:mental illness because they might lose their children, somebody might judge
Speaker:them, somebody might be unkind to them, somebody might misunderstand, somebody
Speaker:might think they're an unfit mother
Speaker:Welcome to You're Not Too Much from the Different Not Broken Network, a podcast
Speaker:about how you're not too much, they're not enough, space expands, so let's fill it.
Speaker:It's no surprise to anybody who's listening that I miss my dad.
Speaker:I miss my dad a lot.
Speaker:The times that I miss my dad, I mean, I miss him all the time.
Speaker:It's not like there's a minute that I wake up and I'm like, "I don't miss
Speaker:him right now. This is fine." But the times that I miss him more acutely than
Speaker:others are probably not the times that normal people do, or normal people have,
Speaker:like, grief things about their parents.
Speaker:And trust me, I get lots of grief from the parent that I do have, and there
Speaker:are lots of other grief things involved.
Speaker:But the way that I have felt, heard my dad's voice screaming in my ear For the
Speaker:last couple of weeks, probably longer.
Speaker:I mean, it's always in there.
Speaker:Like, we were doing a recording this morning, this is silly, but we were
Speaker:doing a recording this morning for our, one of our other podcasts, You're Not
Speaker:In Charge of the Scale, which by the way, go listen to it, it's amazing.
Speaker:And one of the things that came up was how generations like mine and older were
Speaker:always told by our parents that there are starving children in Africa, so you
Speaker:have to eat all your food off your plate.
Speaker:The guest, as well as the host, Stephanie, they were just talking about
Speaker:how that was so heavily prevalent in their homes growing up, and I just
Speaker:started laughing because that is not the message that I got in my home.
Speaker:It was similar, but if we left food on our plate, my dad would say, "You have
Speaker:to eat all your food because there are starving women in Beverly Hills." Those
Speaker:are the things that I hear in my head when we talk about parental messaging.
Speaker:Also, any time something's going wrong or I'm having a bad day, I hear my
Speaker:dad's voice saying, "No matter how bad it is, it can always get worse."
Speaker:Which is so uplifting.
Speaker:So very uplift- anyway, that was my childhood.
Speaker:My dad was also a psychiatrist.
Speaker:If you're old here, how do you not know that?
Speaker:I say it like it means something to my credibility, but I did run
Speaker:his practice for, like, 10 years.
Speaker:And when my dad made decisions on patients, he always explained them, even
Speaker:to somebody who was non-clinical, meaning if he decided that somebody needed a
Speaker:specific medication, he would tell you the reason he was giving them the medication.
Speaker:For a couple of reasons.
Speaker:One, he just liked teaching people, but two, like, there is a reality
Speaker:where you're gonna have to answer questions from a patient, and you should
Speaker:know what the thought process was.
Speaker:He would document it, he would explain it, and he really liked
Speaker:talking about what he did.
Speaker:And so the arsenal of unusable information that I have about psychiatry is huge.
Speaker:Unusable because I'm not a psychiatrist and I don't have a DEA number,
Speaker:and I can't prescribe medication.
Speaker:You know, it'd be kind of illegal if I tried, so I'm not going to.
Speaker:But, like, it's all up there, and it leads to kind of interesting situations
Speaker:when you see things like what's happening in our current, it's not pop
Speaker:culture, in our current news cycle.
Speaker:But my dad was not only a psychiatrist, but he was a forensic psychiatrist,
Speaker:and that meant that he worked at the intersection of medicine and the law.
Speaker:So he was not a lawyer, but he had extensive legal training about how
Speaker:healthcare and the decisions that people make as a result of their medical
Speaker:conditions or the healthcare they receive can impact their decision-making, or
Speaker:impact the legal system in some way.
Speaker:And he used to testify in cases all the time.
Speaker:He Knew a bunch of serial killers.
Speaker:Not as friends, but he had lots of really good stories about serial killers, always
Speaker:de-identified, but still pretty cool.
Speaker:And like, I got to meet a couple.
Speaker:Like, we had some really interesting people come in and out of our office.
Speaker:Like, I've talked to a lot of people in shackles, a lot, and not
Speaker:because it's my personal hobby.
Speaker:I've been to a lot of prisons.
Speaker:I've talked to a lot of prison guards.
Speaker:I've never been in trouble, but I've got lots of experience in how to move
Speaker:through a prison because when you work in forensics, that's what you do.
Speaker:Sometimes you get called to a jail in the middle of the
Speaker:day on a Saturday, and you go.
Speaker:Some prisons will let you bring in support staff, some will not.
Speaker:Most do not let you bring in your phones.
Speaker:So I remember the last time I think he worked in a prison, it was
Speaker:actually not a prison, it was a jail, it was a reception center locally.
Speaker:So every single person who went to jail in Orange County would go through
Speaker:what's called the reception center and get all of their assessments and be
Speaker:held there before they got transferred to whatever place they were going to.
Speaker:And you weren't allowed to bring in your phones, and I think this was before
Speaker:iPhones, so this would've been, like, maybe flip phone territory, but he had
Speaker:an iPod, and he loved having an iPod.
Speaker:But he wasn't allowed to bring in his iPod because it's technology, and you
Speaker:weren't allowed to sneak in technology.
Speaker:And so this man, he was already past retirement age.
Speaker:Like, he worked a long time.
Speaker:He was already past retirement age.
Speaker:He went on eBay and purchased himself a watch with a hidden MP3 player, so
Speaker:that when he got checked by the guards when he was walking into work every
Speaker:day, they would just look at his watch and be like, "Oh, that's a watch But
Speaker:he had headphones in his pocket, and he could plug them into his watch and
Speaker:listen to his music, because he didn't like to go anywhere without his iPod.
Speaker:Anyway, that was what my dad was like.
Speaker:But there is a world where, and this wouldn't have happened 'cause
Speaker:he was never in Massachusetts, or not for longer than a, a visit.
Speaker:But there's a world where if this were 10 or 15 years ago, my dad is the guy that
Speaker:would've been called to testify or to give expert information on somebody like
Speaker:Lindsay Clancy, and he did many times.
Speaker:And I sat in countless depositions with him.
Speaker:There would be paperwork he needed.
Speaker:There would be files that he needed, and we always had to provide them.
Speaker:I've been sworn in by many a, a court reporter for just being
Speaker:support staff in one of those things.
Speaker:He did work on a lot of really high-profile cases, and the reason that
Speaker:matters is I know his work so well, and I know the work we did together so
Speaker:well, that I can hear him screaming.
Speaker:And yes, I understand the deep irony that the voice in my head is a psychiatrist.
Speaker:I get that.
Speaker:I see it.
Speaker:But I can hear him screaming about the conversations we're having about
Speaker:Lindsay Clancy right now, and how much we are absolutely missing the point,
Speaker:and how this is not about postpartum anything, and that there are healthcare
Speaker:providers who should lose their licenses.
Speaker:The conversation itself is not wrong.
Speaker:It is correct.
Speaker:We should be having conversations about postpartum depression.
Speaker:We should be having conversations about postpartum mental illness.
Speaker:We absolutely should be.
Speaker:That is not a question.
Speaker:We know that postpartum women are prone to specific mental illnesses, that they
Speaker:can be hard to predict, that they can make it very hard to bond with your children.
Speaker:They can make reasonable people do what appear to be some
Speaker:really unreasonable things.
Speaker:They make women feel worthless.
Speaker:They make them feel incapable.
Speaker:They make them feel all sorts of awful things about themselves, awful
Speaker:things about themselves that are not true, awful things about their
Speaker:children that are not true, and Most of the time women get through it.
Speaker:Whether it's with intervention or not, they get through it.
Speaker:That does not mean they should be white-knuckling it
Speaker:through the postpartum period.
Speaker:We should make better help available for women 100% without question.
Speaker:The Lindsay Clancy outcome is a rare but possible outcome of a postpartum illness.
Speaker:And I wanna say, I am not a clinician.
Speaker:I have been deeply exposed to a lot of mental health conditions by nature of
Speaker:working in this field, listening to my dad say a lot of things, running his
Speaker:practice for as long as I did, seeing the ins and outs of a field that as
Speaker:much as it is finally getting some additional, it's not recognition, but
Speaker:consideration for being real, and that the things that happen to people are real.
Speaker:Mental illness is real, let's put it that way.
Speaker:It's still deeply misunderstood.
Speaker:It's still deeply oversimplified.
Speaker:But I'm not a clinician.
Speaker:I did not go to medical school.
Speaker:I am not a psychiatrist.
Speaker:I cannot prescribe medications.
Speaker:So what I am saying is the byproduct of lots of exposure
Speaker:that I cannot call expertise, and I wanna be clear about that.
Speaker:But my dad is not here to talk for himself, and I am sharing
Speaker:with you what I know he would say.
Speaker:I know there is an absolutely important conversation we need to have about
Speaker:postpartum illnesses, about what support in the postpartum period actually looks
Speaker:like, and about women who are scared to disclose the extent of their postpartum
Speaker:mental illness because they might lose their children, somebody might judge
Speaker:them, somebody might be unkind to them, somebody might misunderstand, somebody
Speaker:might think they're an unfit mother.
Speaker:There's also a ton of guilt that comes along with that that keeps
Speaker:people from disclosing all of that.
Speaker:Lindsay Clancy had a postpartum mental illness, no question Lindsay
Speaker:Clancy was also diagnosed as bipolar.
Speaker:That came out in trial.
Speaker:Lindsay Clancy was not psychotic that we know of until a maybe well-meaning,
Speaker:but deeply incorrect psychiatrist gave her medications that are
Speaker:known, documented, and established to make bipolar people worse.
Speaker:That is what happened.
Speaker:Her mental illness did not make her psychotic, her medication did.
Speaker:And if you change the conversation from, "This woman just got acutely psychotic
Speaker:because she's mentally ill," to, "A psychotic episode was precipitated
Speaker:by a psychiatrist who treated her poorly, who gave her bad healthcare,"
Speaker:this is a very different conversation.
Speaker:This is not about some inept mother who just couldn't handle her mental health.
Speaker:This is about a clinician who should lose their license.
Speaker:I, as a layperson, acutely know that antidepressants make bipolar people worse.
Speaker:I've seen it happen.
Speaker:We ran our practice for about 10 years, and by that, I was there for 10 years.
Speaker:My dad was on year 55 by the time he died.
Speaker:He had some experience that I did not.
Speaker:30%, please hear me when I say that, it's so fricking important, 30% of our
Speaker:patient population were people who came to us after having been seen by their GP,
Speaker:their other psychiatrist, an emergency room, or a hospital, who were put on
Speaker:a medication because they said they were depressed and got acutely worse.
Speaker:Sometimes that meant they were suicidal.
Speaker:Sometimes that meant that they were having a manic episode.
Speaker:Sometimes that meant they had racing thoughts and couldn't sit still.
Speaker:Sometimes it made them completely sleepless.
Speaker:Sometimes it did all of those things.
Speaker:And what people don't understand about bipolar illness, especially when you have
Speaker:this whole other side of precipitation by medication, meaning we took a disease
Speaker:that was already uncomfortable and hard to manage, and we made it exponentially
Speaker:worse by introducing a medication that was incorrect for the patient.
Speaker:We're not talking about necessarily somebody who gets really depressed and
Speaker:suicidal and stays that way for days and days at a time, though that can happen.
Speaker:A bipolar depression can last five minutes, and in that five minutes, this is
Speaker:something my dad used to say all the time, I'm literally regurgitating his words.
Speaker:In that five minutes, if you're next to an open window on a 44th floor, you
Speaker:could go out the window, not because you were suicidal five minutes before, but
Speaker:because that's how bipolar illness works.
Speaker:Is it likely that somebody who just has a bipolar or just has a regular
Speaker:depression, a postpartum depression, would hurt their children in 30 minutes
Speaker:or an hour while their partner is gone?
Speaker:Is it likely?
Speaker:No.
Speaker:Is it possible?
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:But somebody who is not only bipolar but made worse by their
Speaker:medication, pushed into an acute mania, yes, that is very possible.
Speaker:It is not only very possible, the things that happen to
Speaker:cause that are well-documented.
Speaker:The conversation Between postpartum disease and shit ass medical
Speaker:care needs to be separated.
Speaker:Because there are people suffering from postpartum illness who should
Speaker:not be lumped in with somebody who killed her three children.
Speaker:I don't say that with a hint of judgment toward Lindsay Clancy, I really don't.
Speaker:The conversation about postpartum illness is different than the
Speaker:conversation about Lindsay Clancy.
Speaker:Lindsay Clancy was made worse by medication, and that is not to say
Speaker:that all medication makes you worse, and it is not to say that you should
Speaker:not seek medication when you are sick.
Speaker:I am not dissuading that at all.
Speaker:I am saying that she got shit ass medical care, that she deserved a doctor who
Speaker:knew what the fuck they were doing.
Speaker:That's the conversation.
Speaker:And again, I am speaking out of turn here to give you the things that
Speaker:my dad would've said from beyond the grave that I heard him say so
Speaker:many times, that I've literally watched him testify to in the past.
Speaker:Did she do it?
Speaker:Absolutely.
Speaker:That sucks.
Speaker:I'm devastated for everybody in her life, including her, that the outcome of that
Speaker:shit ass medical care is what it was.
Speaker:But what she did could happen to anybody who receives the same type of
Speaker:bad medical care that she received.
Speaker:Because the point of a bipolar illness is that it's unpredictable, and if you
Speaker:make somebody manic and acutely psychotic by prescribing the wrong medications…
Speaker:This woman was complaining of poor sleep.
Speaker:She was complaining of increased anxiety.
Speaker:She was complaining of worsening intrusive thoughts.
Speaker:She was complaining about racing thoughts.
Speaker:All of those were so pervasive.
Speaker:And somebody did try her on a mood stabilizer, but sometimes
Speaker:you have to try several.
Speaker:Like, the answer was not increase in antidepressant.
Speaker:That was never the answer.
Speaker:I just wanna make sure we're having the right conversation.
Speaker:The conversation about postpartum illness was absolutely the correct
Speaker:conversation to be had until she got sidled with a physician who didn't
Speaker:know what the hell they were doing.
Speaker:She deserved better medical care.
Speaker:Her children deserved for her to have better medical care.
Speaker:My dad's talking from beyond the grave.
Speaker:If anybody wants to know anything about, like, what it was like to be alive
Speaker:when, like, The Beatles were hitting the shore, I can probably try to access
Speaker:that, too, but I don't Those are other things that are in his expertise.
Speaker:But I am fully talking out of turn here, right?
Speaker:I have exposure, I have kind of peripheral alignment, but I
Speaker:am not the expert in the room.
Speaker:But I've been in the room with the expert a whole lot, and I can hear
Speaker:his voice very loudly saying that our medical system screwed up badly,
Speaker:and three children died as a result.
Speaker:And it is going to affect women with postpartum illness, affect the judgment
Speaker:that women feel, affect the stigma that they face, affect their willingness
Speaker:to disclose what they're feeling.
Speaker:It's going to affect that for a very long time.
Speaker:And that is one of the many things in this situation that sucks, but it does suck.
Speaker:That's my rant from Beyond the Grave.
