If you only watch or listen to one thing from the ongoing Lindsay Clancy trial, which has now enraptured the entire internet, I strongly recommend making it this:
After reading this I can only assume I've fallen victim to a dramatised exaggerated click bait title.
Everything I've heard online is that she had post-partum psychosis and killed her 3 kids. Then a whole bunch of women are posting that they feel the same. How am I not to understand that these women are admitting they want to kill their babies? What empathy am I supposedly missing? She was psychotic and killed her 3 kids. Its tragic and she is in no way excused because what she did has a medical diagnosis. She killed her 3 kids!
How is this all men's fault? Is your only contribution to this mess yelling at all men for what a couple idiots are screaming online?
Show me one unambiguous example of a woman publicly admitting that she wants to kill her own babies? I understand there are lots of TikToks floating around where women talk about dealing with similar intrusive thoughts as Lindsay did -- but the whole point is that they're *intrusive thoughts,* and therefore do NOT reflect their actual wants. They of course DO NOT actually want to harm their children, and yet have struggled with intrusive thoughts to that effect. Just as Lindsay did. She's obviously an extreme aberration in terms of what those thoughts culminated in, but as to the intrusive thoughts themselves, it's clearly something that a large number of women can personally relate to. And... OK? Why are we supposed to have a panic about this, exactly? Do you seriously take it to mean that huge percentages of women are just sadistic homicidal maniacs who harbor genuine murderous hatred toward their own babies and toddlers? Because THAT is delusional. Now, if you've somehow seen any women openly declaring that they REALLY SINCERELY DO want to kill their babies, that would be much more disturbing and surprising. I'd like to see those confessions, so please pass them along. Because as of now, I'm only aware of women who've relayed that they can personally relate to some of the psychological difficulties Lindsay experienced. NOT that they have a genuine secret desire to literally murder their own children. Come on. That's r*tarded.
If you are going to say retarded, just say retarded.
I'm sure there are idiots out there panicking and screaming that all women want to kill their babies. They are retarded. I'm not claiming that, nor do I think most people who are concerned with the social media posts and support group outside the courthouse.
The Tiktok trend just have women hold or creepily stroking their babies with the text "same Lindsay" on the screen. How am I, or to your point, any of us to know just how far they agree with Lindsay? They are not going to outright say they want to kill their babies on social media. There are so many less ambigious ways to discuss and highlight the very real issue that postpartum depression represents. How would you interpret a trend of guys saying "same Bob" while Bob is on trial for brutally killing his family? Don't worry the guys are just agreeing with Bob's "centering" of toxic male tendensies to bottle up stress and depression until they...well brutal kill their family.
Can we look at the numbers for late term abortions that were not for the health of the mother or recently made legal postpartum abortions? That would show a revealed preference for women choosing to kill babies.
You wrote, "How am I not to understand that these women are admitting they want to kill their babies?" I asked you for an example of a woman making a statement that should compel this understanding. Because I genuinely haven't seen one.
And I responded that it is a disengenious request. You are asking me to find an example of a woman willingly and explicitly admitting on social media to want to commit felony murder. Even if you assume that the post would not be taken down or censored, what murderer...sorry potential murderer would post that?
So I'm ignoring your request because as I also responded my concern and argument does not hinge on finding a large number of those posts. My argument hinges on the vocal outcry of support for an admitted murderer. My criticism and worry are directed at the the women making those posts. Not all women.
You should look up what intrusive thoughts are. I think it's possible that some of the woman you talk about have malicious intent but most FEAR they could sth. like this. Almost all people with intrusive thoughts don't act on them.
Maybe you can explain the large numbers of women that donated a million dollars to the woman that murdered her three children, and bring their own babies to protest in front of the courthouse for Clancy.
Yes that type of thing is critical: the distinction between intrusive thoughts over actual wants, however, I wonder if someone in psychiatric therapy when they convey such intrusive thoughts to their psychiatrist, and then the psychiatrist interprets that to mean let’s give the patient medication even just purely based on intrusive thoughts.
And then one thing leads to another to a cocktail of drugs to some unfortunate traagedy. I don’t mean this strickly in cases of PPD, but other labeled mental health problems and issues(i.e. generally speaking).
I think it is partly a cultural or philosophical issue. I think the move away from individual responsibility in the past few decades in part of the root cause. The default should be every individual is directly responsible for their actions. You can have whatever thoughts you want, but its your responsible to decide what turns into an action. By making everything a diagnosable condition and especially turning to medication immediately, it enables people to claim their actions are not their responsibility. I understand there will be extreme cases that need medical or social help to manage their actions.
It's very obvious that most of the negative male reaction has nothing to do with the legal technicalities of the case, and everything to do with the mass outpouring of female support for Clancy (something that isn't forthcoming from men for male child murderers, whether they are clinically psychotic or not), but don't let that stop you from picking up your One Of The Good Ones Award from your platonic female friends.
Ah, thanks Jack, I wasn't sure if anybody would actually come over to Substack and accuse me of having a secret sexual gratification motive, but you really came in the clutch. Super intelligent response to a 6,000 word article.
When male feminists get prostate cancer, they learn that their feminist buddies made sure that three times more taxpayer funds are spent on breast cancer than prostate cancer.
I think it is safe to say that ship sailed long ago with his defense of Epstein, Miller, et al. He seems committed to the idea that almost everyone accused of a prominent crime is innocent, male or female. Sometimes he may be right. And he is always sincere. But that is the internet niche has has currently found.
I think your first point is reasonable and relevant, but then you had to go and spoil it by insinuating MT isn't acting in good faith, and is just trying to be a feminist house n**a
He's sincere. And he was right about Epstein and Maxwell.
That would be putting things too strongly (and I very much dislike arbitrary accusations of bad faith). What I think is that he’s had to write a lot about female lies and delusions lately, and now wants to show some balance by seizing on an instance of men going loopy over a high profile court case. Problem is that the basis for comparison just isn’t there.
He attacked the Epstein hysteria because he thought that it was factually exaggerated, not because he wanted to fight "female delusions". Why are you people so retarded
But two things can be true at the same time. It can be an opportunity to show a little "fair and balanced" to the ladies after his pieces on the Epstein saga and to highlight an instance of men on the internet going "a little loopy" over this case. I'm not sure what you mean by "the basis of comparison" not being there - but based on what I've been seeing in comments threads, the facts very much are there to support such a claim. It's tricky because while I do agree with some of the claims being made about double standards, it's also true that a lot of these people are making pretty hysterical remarks about "evil" and the like
Yeah I considered that, and after reading up on the case and the controversy, came to a similar conclusion. He sees this as an opportunity to maybe balance his own "optics".
Sure, that's accurate with regard to why he "attacked the Epstein hysteria", but his work may have been received in certain quarters as being biased against "victims", who are overwhelmingly female. I'm just speculating, but IF he's the sort to care about "optics" I could see why this case might present an opportunity to knock off two birds with one stone - expose prosecutorial shenanigans and take a shot at "meathead men" thus getting him back in the good graces of the aforementioned certain quarter of society.
That's IF he cares about that sort of thing. I genuinely don't know. Nor particularly care.
(1) I genuinely appreciate the inoculation Michael’s post here has provided against me getting sucked into some stupid Culture War perception of this case, about which I knew nothing before it blew up everywhere in the last few days. Having said that:
(2) With respect to this: “Claiming that anyone who points out the mountain of mitigating evidence as to Lindsay’s criminal culpability must be Defending/Excusing child homicide is just the cheap deflection of a scoundrel ….” This is a semantic point, but what her side is arguing in court is by definition a “defense,” and is also under the law an “excuse” (though I don’t specifically know that the Massachusetts law uses the word) for what would normally be a criminal act (i.e., they’re not arguing justification nor, as far as I can tell, mitigation; “lack of criminal responsibility” is in fact a legal excuse). Michael seems to have identified some bad eggs on the social media, but he’s not on the surest ground by decrying them for saying something accurate in the context of the trial.
(3) I bridle a bit at this: “Why exactly do you figure she would’ve killed her three children, if not out of a genuinely ‘psychotic’ belief that she too was actually saving them? What else could she have possibly gotten from this? Fame? Fortune? Freedom? Please.” I’m not too comfortable with the inexplicable evil of a crime being treated *per se* as evidence of lack of criminal responsibility. The same rhetorical questions could be posed about someone who shoves a stranger in front of a subway train. After all, what benefit do they derive? It could be replied that mental illness is likely playing a prominent role there as well. And I would agree, and indeed it could even be sufficient to preclude the state of mind required to find the shover criminally liable. But there, as here, let’s put the accused to the trouble of establishing that fact through psychiatric testimony (or, if no trial, at least a report). Having the heinousness of the offense itself serve as evidence against prosecuting it as a crime is a self-licking ice cream cone that is best left in the freezer.
When people chant THERE'S NO EXCUSE FOR KILLING THREE CHILDREN -- the most banal moral truism imaginable -- they are almost always using "excuse" as a loose synonym for "justification." Which absolutely no one (who's sane) has done here. But fine, if you want to say that a jury in the notorious liberal feminist soft-on-crime enclave of Harris County, TX found that sufficient "excuses" existed to preclude convicting Andrea Yates of first-degree murder... OK I guess. But the way the word "excuse" has been invoked in the popular discussion around this issue has overwhelmingly been a huge misrepresentation.
From a philosophical perspective I agree with you on point 2. Many defendants in the CJS have mental illness. For women the vast majority prisonera have mental illness that is untreated.
As per McNaughton rules the insanity defence is a plea for mercy. Essentially McNaughton rule states that a defendant is not responsible for a crime if a mental defect caused a error in reason, meaning they did not know the nature of the act or that it was wrong.
In Massachusetts it must also pass through a second door, the person must have been unable to stop themselves from doing the act. Under Massachusetts law, once defence has raised sufficient evidence for NGRI the burden of proof lies on prosecution to prove the defendant was not under duress of insanity. Insanity defence in MHO is too narrow a window for most defendants to pass through. Only a 1/4 of those seeking insanity defence actually meet criteria.
To sum up, the absence of motive doesn't prove the one is innocent, it isn't required for criminal conviction either. However in LCs case, there's mounting evidence that she was floridly psychotic with command hallucinations at time of offending & they were ego syntonic, meaning more difficult to recognise as problematic vs ego dystonic (recognised as unwanted).
It is actually funny that you ignore in your contrarian standpoint how privileged Clancy was in comparison to other mothers in America. You are the only Western country without formal maternity leave. How long can the "postpartum" excuse be extended while in the US a mother of an 8 month child is not considered "postpartum" practically in any other aspect of life? Your country forces mothers to go back to work full time often after 2 weeks from delivery. A maternity break takes usually 6-12 weeks in the US which is considered crazy and almost inhumane in Europe. She still didnt come back to work at 8 months after the birth of baby number three and had all the help of her husband and grandparents. She also had good medical insurance, access to mental health medication and inpatient treatment - something that maybe a few per cent of women in the US can freely and effortlessly have these days. If she was scared she could harm the children - then who if not the woman in her situation actually had the means to run away from the family, check into the hospital or even into the hotel, try to wait over the crazy period, see how she would feel after some time. In such scenario the worst she could experience is to be called a bad mother - still better I guess than being your children's murderer... I do not understand how the system 'failed' Lindsay Clancy if she could access practically everything the system offered her - other women rarely have such luxury.
It is funny to me that you always point out how Jeffrey Epstein adult victims/accusers had the agency in their own lives (work, career, travel, other romantic and sexual relationships) in so many aspects and yet they claim Epstein and his people allegedly 'enslaved' them mentally so they could not walk away or stop the alleged abuse. You dont buy their explanation and say that they had a choice in that situation and simply refuse to take accountability for their own actions. That they call certain sexual acts rape even though 20 years ago they perceived them as consensual. Yet you fail to see the same pattern with Clancy who was privileged enough and in a perfect position to seek help for her alleged mental issues, she practically checked every box to be able to help herself but yet should be considered not capable of taking responsibility for murdering her own children.
Sadly, I see the only logic you stay loyal to is contrarianism.
Personally, I think Clancy was somehow insane or at least mentally unwell but not necessarily in a postpartum psychotic state so she should be found guilty. Her lawyers use the excuse of the latter because of her privilege and the social climate of idiocy that manifests in those women dancing and chanting in front of the court almost claiming a mother 'had a right' to go insane and murder her kids. I would not leave a goldfish with those women alone and I say it as a woman and a mother myself.
Not to mention that sick men who much more often kill their whole family and later commit suicide receive absolutely zero sympathy or support from the people (besides maybe some incels or redpillers). And this is good they get little mercy from society. Same should be applied here.
Lindsay Clancy is a criminal defendant, standing trial for first degree murder. She is the one against whom accusations are being leveled, backed by the punitive power of the state. Women who may have engaged in consensual sex acts with Jeffrey Epstein twenty years ago as adults, and now claim they were "sex trafficked," are the ones MAKING the accusations. The proper analogy to Clancy in this respect is therefore Epstein himself, not the "Epstein Survivors" being used as pawns to expand punitive "trafficking" law, extract multi-million dollar settlement payouts, and generally foment hysteria. They're not the reviled ones -- Lindsay and Epstein are. To the degree that Lindsay's agency must be examined here, it bears virtually no relation to how similar matters of agency would be examined relating to the "Epstein Survivors." Lindsay is the one being reviled and punished by the state. There's even a little moral panic being fomented on the basis of her conduct, such that people apparently think she's a new national symbol for some epidemic of women genuinely desiring to kill their own toddlers and babies. For this any many other reasons, your attempted analogy does not hold.
I didnt mean the comparison between the accused parties. I meant the comparison between WOMEN and their role and agency in both cases. In Epstein case you say the accusers should have taken responsibility for their own choice of socializing with him. So they are accountable for their choice, you dismiss any argument that they were manipulated, coerced or thereatened. See, in Clancy case I say she should be held fully responsible for murdering her children and I dismiss the argument she had any "postpartum" psychosis or clinical insanity.
I agree that LC was economically, & perhaps socially privileged compared to many other women who've tried to claim insanity on post partum grounds & failed. Social factors such as single parenthood, poverty etc are known risk factors that can exacerbated PND. However that said, legally each case turns on its own facts. LCs case is important because it highlights the unique mental health challenges faced by women. I only wish poor & marginalised women received the same attention when facing the criminal courts.
Please note, I haven't ever said "the system failed" Lindsay. That's just a cliche. "The system" isn't what's on trial in Plymouth County, Massachusetts -- Lindsay Clancy is. I'm not the one trying to turn the trial into a symbolic referendum on other political, cultural, or economic issues. This article is 6,000+ words on Lindsay's own criminal culpability or lack thereof, and the elements the government must prove to establish her guilt.
It can be used as cliche it's also an evidence based phenomenon. The mental health issue most commonly diagnosed in males is substance use disorder (sud). SUD gets consistently more fiscal allocation from major institutions like NHS etc than post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Anxiety, depression, PTSD are most common in females. In fact females are at double risk of PTSD compared to men.BPD research is very scarce & this disorder is also largely diagnosed in females.
We can see LC as exceptional, a rare case of a woman going mad, not getting the treatment she needs, or we can see her as part of a broader pattern. Certainly LCs not the only woman to have killed her children due to PPP or to be publicly hated so vociferously. Lots of women deemed by the courts, fully legally responsible for killing their kids, have had more extreme symptoms than LC combined with poverty, lack of community support etc (Carol Corondao etc).
I have a tendency to see big picture. It's just how my brain works. The granular is important is the courtroom. Beyond that, phenomenon are always nestled in social context.
Women can certainly be bad, evil etc. They can do crimes for selfish/ ego driven reasons- no argument. I'm interested in the differences in men vs women's offending and if those differences can be located in; gendered expectations, institutional responses, knowledge (what do we know/ how do we know it), the legal system itself. This stuff can help us prevent & intervene early.
It is women who insist they are equal to men, until they are held accountable for their actions to the same degree as men, and then they are "just a girl."
By your logic, and assuming you still believe women are equal to men, men should be excused for rape when they are overcome by their hormonal demand that they reproduce.
Quote: "I do not understand how the system 'failed' Lindsay Clancy if she could access practically everything the system offered her - other women rarely have such luxury."
Response: While you're correct that many Americans wouldn't have the access she--a nurse--had to our system's care, in this case the "system" provided Clancy with a slew of powerful anti-psychotic drugs and "benzos" (some of which were prescribed after a 15-minute Zoom call). These were given to her by several different psychiatrists who didn't communicate with each other about the potential overall impact of their prescriptions on their client's mental health.
Per the testimony of several witnesses, Clancy regularly asked for help and expressed concerns about thoughts of harming her children, that she wasn't herself, etc. which is how/why she received these drugs. The treatment she received, while available, seems to have been ill-advised and provided to her in a haphazard manner.
The jury would need to decide whether sleep deprivation, the aforementioned drug cocktail, and a uniquely bad case of postpartum depression could reasonably result in an otherwise normal mother having a psychotic break. If the jury were to decide in the affirmative, it would not excuse the mother of murder, but it could result in a legal "not guilty by reason of insanity" verdict.
Quote: "It is funny to me that you always point out how Jeffrey Epstein adult victims/accusers had the agency in their own lives (work, career, travel, other romantic and sexual relationships) in so many aspects and yet they claim Epstein and his people allegedly 'enslaved' them mentally so they could not walk away or stop the alleged abuse. You dont buy their explanation and say that they had a choice in that situation and simply refuse to take accountability for their own actions. That they call certain sexual acts rape even though 20 years ago they perceived them as consensual. Yet you fail to see the same pattern with Clancy who was privileged enough and in a perfect position to seek help for her alleged mental issues, she practically checked every box to be able to help herself but yet should be considered not capable of taking responsibility for murdering her own children."
Response: These are very different scenarios. Many of the most famous alleged Epstein victims: (a) are plaintiffs; (b) don't have to face an adversarial process; (c) have an obvious motive for rendering previous consensual acts (made up or real) as abuse, as well as lawyers with the same motive; (d) have very little to no credible evidence supporting their claims of abuse. Maybe if you want to compare a specific alleged Epstein victim with Clancy, we could have a more useful comparison, but these are very different cases overall.
As mentioned, Clancy did seek help for her alleged mental issues, and she received it. Regardless of her relative "privilege", was the "help" she received in this specific situation helpful or harmful to her mental state? I would personally vote harmful. And that, among the other factors I mentioned, could influence the jury's verdict.
Quote: "Not to mention that sick men who much more often kill their whole family and later commit suicide receive absolutely zero sympathy or support from the people (besides maybe some incels or redpillers). And this is good they get little mercy from society. Same should be applied here."
Response: I would generally disagree here, as well (respectfully). There is a reason men would get less sympathy as a default, as their brains and hormones aren't physically impacted by pregnancy and its aftermath.
Having said that, I don't believe it's "good" that "[men who commit similar acts] get little mercy from society". In my experience, condemning others and/or taking vicarious joy in punitive action doesn't do any good for anyone, including the victims and society-at-large.
Thank you, Tracey, for proving once more that you are a decent fellow who can use his brain. Had never heard about this case, what with not living in your country and not almost ever listening to what was once called "chronicle" news. Do not have any wish to look into it further, your description and the Resnik video are enough.
The reactions of a certain subset of the population (as shown by a certain subset of your readers too, here below, alas) are appalling.
I am so sorry for this world and this age, where very simple obvious things, the things that hold our civilisation together, need to be repeated so often and still fall on the deaf ears of screaming mobs.
And incidentally, it has gotten to the point where, every time I meet a new person born after 1980 (not that there are none of the previous classes, but they tend to be less online), a new person of either sex or the alternates also, I find myself wondering, "Will you reveal yourself as one of "those"?
To be honest, it is a little like living in The Body Snatchers universe.
Good work, Michael. I haven't been following the case, but I do have some personal acquaintance with psychosis and how it can affect those we love (a woman, actually, which seems relevant here) - it's a terrible, heartbreaking, diabolical illness. The often internally-coherent nature of the delusions is one of the cruelest symptoms because, for the sufferer, what feels like sanity and reason is the very thing that prevents them being able to relate to those others who, not psychotic, still care about them and want better things for them. And so they often isolate, secretive in their suffering and delusional state. I've seen it and felt its impact. I have a lot of sympathy for this poor woman, her husband, and her loved ones. It's such an extreme case, so unimaginably sad and awful.
Even if I hadn't had any personal experience with clinical psychosis and delusion, one would hope I could still see my way to a kinder and gentler position on something that I hope none of us ever have to deal with.
Making this terrible tragedy into a weapon in a dumb "gender war" is beyond heartless.
Well FFS what is Michael on about then? It seems that the fellas might have a point or two. Maybe not about the accused, but about the rather gleeful behaviour from a certain section of society around the trial.
There is no bio-psychological excuse for mass child murder. Nothing prevented the woman from calling for help. Postpartem depression is a euphemism for "I hate parenting," and another example of the medicalization of everyday life.
Uh... she did seek help, REPEATEDLY. Including by surrendering herself for numerous hospitalizations in the weeks and months before the killings. Because she was extremely fearful of her rapidly deteriorating mental state. Thanks for proving my larger point, though.
Men are prima facie protectors, Michael. It's an evolutionary DNA precursor, so try to understand the lymbic brain reaction to three dead kids. But your points are well taken, that is, the biologically objective attempt to discern this woman's spiral into madness without animus or overarching rational perspective. It's a horror show, stem to stern, and there is no excuse for men to exploit it or women to celebrate it, which they are, dressing in pink and standing in solidarity with an unspeakably brutal crime, no matter the circumstances.
If you obstinately refuse to engage in any higher-order reasoning beyond whatever sensations are produced by a "limbic brain reaction," you might as well just be an ape. (Or a literal human baby.) It's not something to be so self-congratulatory about. But the people who do this seem really, aggressively certain that THEY'RE the ones who've achieved some kind of profound moral insight.
I agree. But the point still stands relative to a subterranean cognitive predisposition. It's no different than the maternal instinct, eg, mom lifts car to save child, or the social consensus and emotional outpouring of a child stuck in a well. Base instincts are always there, despite our rational meandering.
Resnick is a dazzling example of the eminent expert who can be rooked as easily as anyone else.
Lindsay Clancy is not now and never was psychotic, in my view--the view, of course, of a mere human being, not an expert, not an investigative journalist--just a woman who's seen women like Clancy before, though most of them are just the sorts of bosses or neighbors you really don't want to have.
When they are mothers like Clancy, they do much of what Clancy has done though almost none of them go quite as far.
Clancy, with her resources and her own network within the world of medical providers, couldn't find one competent pharmacological psychiatrist to work with carefully and compliantly over the course of as many months as necessary to get her head straight?
No, actually she couldn't, because what she has isn't fixable by drugs or talk therapy or having mom sleep next to her during one of her escalating "crises."
The appropriate words for Clancy are most usefully drawn from theology but they're not legally or medically appropriate so we'll leave them out. Medicine doesn't wrangle too effectively with her either, because people like her are pretty rare, overall, and they're not treatable. They're the sorts of people best culled from society.
She has a miswiring of the brain. I suppose one of the Cluster B diagnoses would fit best. She's not an Andrea Yates. She's not a woman who was ever in the grip of psychosis.
She murdered her children ruthlessly, deliberately, in a way that caused each of them maximum terror, and for any dying person it was an eternity of agony and terror until they were dead. Those minutes it took to kill them were a horror, and Clancy did it clear-eyed with rage against them and all of her family.
I understand it's hard to grapple with a woman and mother being able to do that and not be raving mad. But she is, unfortunately, a true example of evil and evil is not madness. It is something incurable.
Ahh the dreaded cluster B disorders. Did you know in women diagnoses, like Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) have their eitology in TRAUMA. Childhood trauma. In other words, adult women with BPD diagnosis were once severely abused/ neglected kids.
Kids grow up, then we hate them? When does the hate start? What's the cut off? As aoon as they're legally deemed adult? What magic event occurs at 18 to sever the compassion?
Do we hold special animosity if traumatised kids are female? The medical/ psychiatric establishment most certainly treats them poorly, evidenced by BPD being the most stigmatised mental illness. BPD women are routinely told " you're attention seeking" and "you're untreatable", " go kill yourself". 90% of those diagnosed as BPD are female. And guess what Childhood trauma is a strong predictor of adulthood PSYCHOSIS, no matter the diagnostic label. Do you hate abused/ neglected girls so much that you'd sooner call them satan? Sound like Salem Witch stuff to me.
And please SAVE IT you're gonna bang on about male defendants. Extensive evidence shows incarcerated females bear disproportionate burdern of mental illness, poverty & victimisation. Men & women commit crimes for vastly different reasons.
Do I wanna see men executed & called Satan? No. Compassion is sorely needed across the entire legal system. With greater focus on rehabilitation. Rarely do individuals require long term incapacitation. If that's necessary, it should be for community safety. Fair to say, men would make up the bulk of this outlier population.
Not necessarily true. 20% of BPD cases have no history of "trauma", childhood or otherwise. This applies fairly evenly to both sexes in cases of BPD - and it's around 48/52 split men/women in terms of total cases by sex.
Jury is very much out on the root cause of BPD with most professionals agreeing that while there may be more than one pathway to developing the disorder, it does seem to be at least partially due to an inborn tendency to experience affect at a greater intensity. They feel emotions more intensely, and are more sensitive to negative interpersonal encounters. There also seems to be a significant "negative bias" in BPD, which can be a problem for reality-testing.
The diagnosis of men with BPD is fairly new phenomenon. Anecdotally I reckon this turn lines up with they/ them no binary stuff. Longitudinal data clearly show a gender bias towards females ib BPD diagnoses. Agee, aetiology is hotly contested. I believe it's a gendered form of PTSD
My takeaway: men are under diagnosed and poorly served by the system. Far too many end up ignored or misdiagnosed until it's too late - or they just throw them in jail.
My numbers are sourced from the mainstream data on diagnoses since 1978.
I do not believe that BPD is "a gendered form of PTSD". I would place my bets on it being a specific neurological profile, with commonalities and/or similar instantiations in males and females.
There is quite a lot of evidence to support your claim about BPD and the "trans" and "non-binary" craze. In fact, many detransitioners have spoken openly about finding out they have the disorder, and how this was either ignored or downplayed by unscrupulous "gender doctors". It's bad stuff, it'll break your heart to hear their stories.
I'm using data from inpatient settings and forensic population. This data show those with severe symptomatology. BPD is ofc spectrum. Agree with neurological profile but these pathways are formed early childhood via, epigenetic effect
I would also want to push back a little on this idea that females have it worse in terms of metal health outcomes. I'm going to refrain from doing so because to push some "gender agenda" here would be in poor taste and instead I'm just going to recommend philosopher David Benatar's book "The Second Sexism". It'll challenge a lot of what you may or may not believe about being male in today's world.
If she had Cluster B, all of her friends and family would've been fed up with her by now bc BPD people are a nightmare to associate with. They wouldn't all be testifying on her behalf, including her husband and his parents. So this seems unlikely.
There are active lawsuits against her providers by Clancy and by her now ex-husband which will of course affect how Mr. Clancy comports himself in public and with reference to his now ex-wife, murderer of their children.
Do you think any of the grandparents wish to admit to anyone, most profoundly to themselves, how badly everyone failed those children killed slowly and deliberately by their mother? Do you think none of them had gotten a little fed up with Lindsay's constant dramas over the course of many months, and how badly they misjudged exactly how far she would go in creating the ultimate tableau of mother driven to the depths of madness because everyone around her "failed" her?
It's too bad so many people of otherwise competent thinking processes have chosen to ignore what is so appallingly plain, and that so many have made a betrayed victim out of a deliberate, ruthless, unrepentant and brutal killer of her own children.
No, I don't think she is a psychopath and I don't think she intended to die. She certainly proved she's an efficient killer when she wants to be. Bad luck for her she ended up paralyzed but she'll milk that for all it's worth for the rest of her life.
Geniuses of the Field of Mental Disorders have a hard time grappling with people like Clancy. They are outside understandable pathways. They're not fixable. Not everyone with that miswiring goes as far as she did; they usually make other people's lives miserable or unpleasant in less appalling but still very damaging ways. They push themselves over the edge. Nothing could have saved those children from her except removing those children from her reach. Even failing to understand exactly what was wrong with Lindsay, the father and the grandparents surely ought to have recognized that the home environment, with Lindsay constantly escalating her dramas, was bad for the children. But she wouldn't let anyone take them for overnight stays. That's one of the great failures of her husband, that he was unable to act as the father his kids needed him to be when they needed him the most.
Ah the old goalposts moving. First it was let us vote, then it was let us run our own businesses, then it was let us erase getting married, because free love baby! Then it was let us kill the babies we create out of wedlock, and now it's let us murder our children and go live in a nice hotel for the rest of our lives, because ya know, we just be crazy. How about No. How about if you post anything related to fantasizing about killing your children on social media, we throw your ass in prison and let you think about your life choices. How about NO to all of this narcissistic garbage death cult they are creating. You would think women in general would see some asinine show like The Handmaids Tale and run in the other direction from all this crap, but instead, they double down, because why not? It's almost like they WANT that "nightmare" to happen. It's almost like we were warned about all this by a guy in the desert ~2800 years ago. It's almost like leftism Is indeed a death cult hell bent on destroying humanity...
More measured analysis from Michael (insert eye-rolling emoji here). I actually agree for the most part, but the ranting style grows very old.
The prosecution’s claim that she faked her suicide attempt is weird and counter-productive. It seems to me the obvious argument for them to make is that she attempted suicide because she felt overwhelming horror and guilt about what she’d done, and that this is evidence of her knowledge that it was wrong. (I think this explanation is actually at least as likely to be true as “voices told her to kill herself” — but I don’t think that it is incompatible with psychosis as the explanation for the murders.)
Unless she threw herself out of a window only 20 feet off the ground or so because she believed it could be argued to be a “suicide attempt” but have a low likelihood of actually killing her
Sorry, don't see it. She jumped headfirst from a second story window, not my first choice when faking a suicide attempt, certainly could have died, and paralyzed herself from the waist down (could easily have been from the neck down, too -- not exactly a desirable outcome). It's possible she was scared about taking her own life (more than she was about killing her children), and therefore took less than foolproof means to do it. The proverbial cry for help that sometimes does end in death, sometimes not. But to see this as some kind of calculated scheme -- no, just don't see that.
She went from executing a deliberate scheme to move her husband out of the house and murder her children - notionally, under “psychosis” - to being so despondent in her right mind over her own most recent actions to attempt suicide, all in the space of time it takes to eat a bag of skittles? Is a “blink and you’re fine” resolution of a psychotic episode consistent with any medicine as we understand it?
She strangled three children by ligature and then decided that her own suicide had to be by fall? And not, say, by hanging, which she had all the stuff for?
1) I didn’t say she was definitely in a psychotic episode. And if she wasn’t — well, people do kill others then themselves quite frequently, alas. Probably even psychotic people.
2) I’m not sure psychosis means you can’t decide to get someone to leave the house first so you can carry out the deed. If you’re convinced you need to kill, you want to make sure you’re able to do that without interference. I don’t believe “psychotic episode” = “inability to plan.”
3) “Fall” is not quite the same as “paralyzing dive on head from second floor window.”
She was also convinced she needed to succeed at killing (and not be stopped by her doctors or her husband) and that she needed to get away with it (hence the “suicide attempt” and insanity plea)
The issue with making an insanity plea to your crime is that you don’t get to point to the crime and say “only the insane would do this” - you can’t benefit, legally, from having committed the very crime you’re on trial for
Putting the “suicide attempt” in quotes doesn’t make your case any more persuasive. And pleading insanity doesn’t (necessarily) mean you were actually sane and just trying to “get away with it.” Sometimes — and no, I don’t know for sure in this case, of course — but sometimes, people plead insanity because it fits the bill.
As you alluded to it’s just a pathetic attempt at a culture war. Because Trump has failed them on every conceivable way, all they have left is to ‘own the libs’ on social media. Liberal women rally in support of X, then we must be for Y. Rinse and repeat
Every murder is a product of misfiring chemicals in the brain. Whether this one deserves special treatment for crossing some arbitrary threshold is up to Massachusetts law, but that does not mean people are obligated to morally excuse her. Her brain murdered three children, and is also the entirety of who she is.
Damm Tracey! Adroit authorship, granular forensic analysis, compassion, scepticism towards the state, it's all here.
I haven't finished yet, gotta get pup to the vet. One early thought; agree prosection expenses should/could have been diverted to prevention/ early intervention. This is the sort of critical lens we need on criminal justice, urgently.
I'll be back later with more thoughts. Take care, it hurts my heart reading about these children's suffering AND the prosectorial spatter fest, that eviscerates traumatised women (business as usual- just look at the rates of mental disorder, victimisation, poverty in the female carceral complex and compare it with community support available to them, gendered expections). This is about more than LC. AND I wholeheartedly support your Epstein related stuff. People struggle with the idea that two things can be true at once.
Other than your intuition and anecdotal observation about how the gender divide is on the judgement of this case, do you have any substantial data to back it up? People have said the same thing about abortion, but in fact there is no such divide. People who are “pro choice” sometimes claim that “pro life” people are just males who have no empathy for women, but when we look at the data we discover that it’s actually not an enormous gender gap and that it tracks other things like political party affiliation more than gender.
I have no opinion about this case. I have not been following it at all. I do have an opinion on your article, and I didn’t read it all cuz it’s very long and it never provided the data I’d expect for you to lean in so heavily into the gender war stuff. Do you ever provide anything? If you do maybe I’ll read the whole thing. If not, this thing is a mess, especially given how much you hysterically
disparage some people for their logical reasoning. It may have been fine if you didn’t go with the war of the sexes framing without any data backing it up.
After reading this I can only assume I've fallen victim to a dramatised exaggerated click bait title.
Everything I've heard online is that she had post-partum psychosis and killed her 3 kids. Then a whole bunch of women are posting that they feel the same. How am I not to understand that these women are admitting they want to kill their babies? What empathy am I supposedly missing? She was psychotic and killed her 3 kids. Its tragic and she is in no way excused because what she did has a medical diagnosis. She killed her 3 kids!
How is this all men's fault? Is your only contribution to this mess yelling at all men for what a couple idiots are screaming online?
Show me one unambiguous example of a woman publicly admitting that she wants to kill her own babies? I understand there are lots of TikToks floating around where women talk about dealing with similar intrusive thoughts as Lindsay did -- but the whole point is that they're *intrusive thoughts,* and therefore do NOT reflect their actual wants. They of course DO NOT actually want to harm their children, and yet have struggled with intrusive thoughts to that effect. Just as Lindsay did. She's obviously an extreme aberration in terms of what those thoughts culminated in, but as to the intrusive thoughts themselves, it's clearly something that a large number of women can personally relate to. And... OK? Why are we supposed to have a panic about this, exactly? Do you seriously take it to mean that huge percentages of women are just sadistic homicidal maniacs who harbor genuine murderous hatred toward their own babies and toddlers? Because THAT is delusional. Now, if you've somehow seen any women openly declaring that they REALLY SINCERELY DO want to kill their babies, that would be much more disturbing and surprising. I'd like to see those confessions, so please pass them along. Because as of now, I'm only aware of women who've relayed that they can personally relate to some of the psychological difficulties Lindsay experienced. NOT that they have a genuine secret desire to literally murder their own children. Come on. That's r*tarded.
If you are going to say retarded, just say retarded.
I'm sure there are idiots out there panicking and screaming that all women want to kill their babies. They are retarded. I'm not claiming that, nor do I think most people who are concerned with the social media posts and support group outside the courthouse.
The Tiktok trend just have women hold or creepily stroking their babies with the text "same Lindsay" on the screen. How am I, or to your point, any of us to know just how far they agree with Lindsay? They are not going to outright say they want to kill their babies on social media. There are so many less ambigious ways to discuss and highlight the very real issue that postpartum depression represents. How would you interpret a trend of guys saying "same Bob" while Bob is on trial for brutally killing his family? Don't worry the guys are just agreeing with Bob's "centering" of toxic male tendensies to bottle up stress and depression until they...well brutal kill their family.
Can we look at the numbers for late term abortions that were not for the health of the mother or recently made legal postpartum abortions? That would show a revealed preference for women choosing to kill babies.
You wrote, "How am I not to understand that these women are admitting they want to kill their babies?" I asked you for an example of a woman making a statement that should compel this understanding. Because I genuinely haven't seen one.
And I responded that it is a disengenious request. You are asking me to find an example of a woman willingly and explicitly admitting on social media to want to commit felony murder. Even if you assume that the post would not be taken down or censored, what murderer...sorry potential murderer would post that?
So I'm ignoring your request because as I also responded my concern and argument does not hinge on finding a large number of those posts. My argument hinges on the vocal outcry of support for an admitted murderer. My criticism and worry are directed at the the women making those posts. Not all women.
You should look up what intrusive thoughts are. I think it's possible that some of the woman you talk about have malicious intent but most FEAR they could sth. like this. Almost all people with intrusive thoughts don't act on them.
Maybe you can explain the large numbers of women that donated a million dollars to the woman that murdered her three children, and bring their own babies to protest in front of the courthouse for Clancy.
Do YOU trust women that bring their own babies to support child murderer Lindsay Clancy in front of the courthouse?
Yes that type of thing is critical: the distinction between intrusive thoughts over actual wants, however, I wonder if someone in psychiatric therapy when they convey such intrusive thoughts to their psychiatrist, and then the psychiatrist interprets that to mean let’s give the patient medication even just purely based on intrusive thoughts.
And then one thing leads to another to a cocktail of drugs to some unfortunate traagedy. I don’t mean this strickly in cases of PPD, but other labeled mental health problems and issues(i.e. generally speaking).
I think it is partly a cultural or philosophical issue. I think the move away from individual responsibility in the past few decades in part of the root cause. The default should be every individual is directly responsible for their actions. You can have whatever thoughts you want, but its your responsible to decide what turns into an action. By making everything a diagnosable condition and especially turning to medication immediately, it enables people to claim their actions are not their responsibility. I understand there will be extreme cases that need medical or social help to manage their actions.
It's very obvious that most of the negative male reaction has nothing to do with the legal technicalities of the case, and everything to do with the mass outpouring of female support for Clancy (something that isn't forthcoming from men for male child murderers, whether they are clinically psychotic or not), but don't let that stop you from picking up your One Of The Good Ones Award from your platonic female friends.
Ah, thanks Jack, I wasn't sure if anybody would actually come over to Substack and accuse me of having a secret sexual gratification motive, but you really came in the clutch. Super intelligent response to a 6,000 word article.
Thanks for giving us another demonstration (nay, two; see the comment below) of your skill at grabbing the wrong end of the stick.
Bro got ratio’d on his own Substack. 😆
Something tells me you would be far less sympathetic to a man that murdered his children.
When male feminists get prostate cancer, they learn that their feminist buddies made sure that three times more taxpayer funds are spent on breast cancer than prostate cancer.
I think it is safe to say that ship sailed long ago with his defense of Epstein, Miller, et al. He seems committed to the idea that almost everyone accused of a prominent crime is innocent, male or female. Sometimes he may be right. And he is always sincere. But that is the internet niche has has currently found.
I think your first point is reasonable and relevant, but then you had to go and spoil it by insinuating MT isn't acting in good faith, and is just trying to be a feminist house n**a
He's sincere. And he was right about Epstein and Maxwell.
That would be putting things too strongly (and I very much dislike arbitrary accusations of bad faith). What I think is that he’s had to write a lot about female lies and delusions lately, and now wants to show some balance by seizing on an instance of men going loopy over a high profile court case. Problem is that the basis for comparison just isn’t there.
Yes, I somehow made a strategic branding decision to vault the Lindsay Clancy case into a huge national controversy.
You didn't do that - feminist women that support female child murderers did that.
He attacked the Epstein hysteria because he thought that it was factually exaggerated, not because he wanted to fight "female delusions". Why are you people so retarded
But two things can be true at the same time. It can be an opportunity to show a little "fair and balanced" to the ladies after his pieces on the Epstein saga and to highlight an instance of men on the internet going "a little loopy" over this case. I'm not sure what you mean by "the basis of comparison" not being there - but based on what I've been seeing in comments threads, the facts very much are there to support such a claim. It's tricky because while I do agree with some of the claims being made about double standards, it's also true that a lot of these people are making pretty hysterical remarks about "evil" and the like
Yeah I considered that, and after reading up on the case and the controversy, came to a similar conclusion. He sees this as an opportunity to maybe balance his own "optics".
Sure, that's accurate with regard to why he "attacked the Epstein hysteria", but his work may have been received in certain quarters as being biased against "victims", who are overwhelmingly female. I'm just speculating, but IF he's the sort to care about "optics" I could see why this case might present an opportunity to knock off two birds with one stone - expose prosecutorial shenanigans and take a shot at "meathead men" thus getting him back in the good graces of the aforementioned certain quarter of society.
That's IF he cares about that sort of thing. I genuinely don't know. Nor particularly care.
(1) I genuinely appreciate the inoculation Michael’s post here has provided against me getting sucked into some stupid Culture War perception of this case, about which I knew nothing before it blew up everywhere in the last few days. Having said that:
(2) With respect to this: “Claiming that anyone who points out the mountain of mitigating evidence as to Lindsay’s criminal culpability must be Defending/Excusing child homicide is just the cheap deflection of a scoundrel ….” This is a semantic point, but what her side is arguing in court is by definition a “defense,” and is also under the law an “excuse” (though I don’t specifically know that the Massachusetts law uses the word) for what would normally be a criminal act (i.e., they’re not arguing justification nor, as far as I can tell, mitigation; “lack of criminal responsibility” is in fact a legal excuse). Michael seems to have identified some bad eggs on the social media, but he’s not on the surest ground by decrying them for saying something accurate in the context of the trial.
(3) I bridle a bit at this: “Why exactly do you figure she would’ve killed her three children, if not out of a genuinely ‘psychotic’ belief that she too was actually saving them? What else could she have possibly gotten from this? Fame? Fortune? Freedom? Please.” I’m not too comfortable with the inexplicable evil of a crime being treated *per se* as evidence of lack of criminal responsibility. The same rhetorical questions could be posed about someone who shoves a stranger in front of a subway train. After all, what benefit do they derive? It could be replied that mental illness is likely playing a prominent role there as well. And I would agree, and indeed it could even be sufficient to preclude the state of mind required to find the shover criminally liable. But there, as here, let’s put the accused to the trouble of establishing that fact through psychiatric testimony (or, if no trial, at least a report). Having the heinousness of the offense itself serve as evidence against prosecuting it as a crime is a self-licking ice cream cone that is best left in the freezer.
When people chant THERE'S NO EXCUSE FOR KILLING THREE CHILDREN -- the most banal moral truism imaginable -- they are almost always using "excuse" as a loose synonym for "justification." Which absolutely no one (who's sane) has done here. But fine, if you want to say that a jury in the notorious liberal feminist soft-on-crime enclave of Harris County, TX found that sufficient "excuses" existed to preclude convicting Andrea Yates of first-degree murder... OK I guess. But the way the word "excuse" has been invoked in the popular discussion around this issue has overwhelmingly been a huge misrepresentation.
From a philosophical perspective I agree with you on point 2. Many defendants in the CJS have mental illness. For women the vast majority prisonera have mental illness that is untreated.
As per McNaughton rules the insanity defence is a plea for mercy. Essentially McNaughton rule states that a defendant is not responsible for a crime if a mental defect caused a error in reason, meaning they did not know the nature of the act or that it was wrong.
In Massachusetts it must also pass through a second door, the person must have been unable to stop themselves from doing the act. Under Massachusetts law, once defence has raised sufficient evidence for NGRI the burden of proof lies on prosecution to prove the defendant was not under duress of insanity. Insanity defence in MHO is too narrow a window for most defendants to pass through. Only a 1/4 of those seeking insanity defence actually meet criteria.
To sum up, the absence of motive doesn't prove the one is innocent, it isn't required for criminal conviction either. However in LCs case, there's mounting evidence that she was floridly psychotic with command hallucinations at time of offending & they were ego syntonic, meaning more difficult to recognise as problematic vs ego dystonic (recognised as unwanted).
It is actually funny that you ignore in your contrarian standpoint how privileged Clancy was in comparison to other mothers in America. You are the only Western country without formal maternity leave. How long can the "postpartum" excuse be extended while in the US a mother of an 8 month child is not considered "postpartum" practically in any other aspect of life? Your country forces mothers to go back to work full time often after 2 weeks from delivery. A maternity break takes usually 6-12 weeks in the US which is considered crazy and almost inhumane in Europe. She still didnt come back to work at 8 months after the birth of baby number three and had all the help of her husband and grandparents. She also had good medical insurance, access to mental health medication and inpatient treatment - something that maybe a few per cent of women in the US can freely and effortlessly have these days. If she was scared she could harm the children - then who if not the woman in her situation actually had the means to run away from the family, check into the hospital or even into the hotel, try to wait over the crazy period, see how she would feel after some time. In such scenario the worst she could experience is to be called a bad mother - still better I guess than being your children's murderer... I do not understand how the system 'failed' Lindsay Clancy if she could access practically everything the system offered her - other women rarely have such luxury.
It is funny to me that you always point out how Jeffrey Epstein adult victims/accusers had the agency in their own lives (work, career, travel, other romantic and sexual relationships) in so many aspects and yet they claim Epstein and his people allegedly 'enslaved' them mentally so they could not walk away or stop the alleged abuse. You dont buy their explanation and say that they had a choice in that situation and simply refuse to take accountability for their own actions. That they call certain sexual acts rape even though 20 years ago they perceived them as consensual. Yet you fail to see the same pattern with Clancy who was privileged enough and in a perfect position to seek help for her alleged mental issues, she practically checked every box to be able to help herself but yet should be considered not capable of taking responsibility for murdering her own children.
Sadly, I see the only logic you stay loyal to is contrarianism.
Personally, I think Clancy was somehow insane or at least mentally unwell but not necessarily in a postpartum psychotic state so she should be found guilty. Her lawyers use the excuse of the latter because of her privilege and the social climate of idiocy that manifests in those women dancing and chanting in front of the court almost claiming a mother 'had a right' to go insane and murder her kids. I would not leave a goldfish with those women alone and I say it as a woman and a mother myself.
Not to mention that sick men who much more often kill their whole family and later commit suicide receive absolutely zero sympathy or support from the people (besides maybe some incels or redpillers). And this is good they get little mercy from society. Same should be applied here.
Lindsay Clancy is a criminal defendant, standing trial for first degree murder. She is the one against whom accusations are being leveled, backed by the punitive power of the state. Women who may have engaged in consensual sex acts with Jeffrey Epstein twenty years ago as adults, and now claim they were "sex trafficked," are the ones MAKING the accusations. The proper analogy to Clancy in this respect is therefore Epstein himself, not the "Epstein Survivors" being used as pawns to expand punitive "trafficking" law, extract multi-million dollar settlement payouts, and generally foment hysteria. They're not the reviled ones -- Lindsay and Epstein are. To the degree that Lindsay's agency must be examined here, it bears virtually no relation to how similar matters of agency would be examined relating to the "Epstein Survivors." Lindsay is the one being reviled and punished by the state. There's even a little moral panic being fomented on the basis of her conduct, such that people apparently think she's a new national symbol for some epidemic of women genuinely desiring to kill their own toddlers and babies. For this any many other reasons, your attempted analogy does not hold.
I didnt mean the comparison between the accused parties. I meant the comparison between WOMEN and their role and agency in both cases. In Epstein case you say the accusers should have taken responsibility for their own choice of socializing with him. So they are accountable for their choice, you dismiss any argument that they were manipulated, coerced or thereatened. See, in Clancy case I say she should be held fully responsible for murdering her children and I dismiss the argument she had any "postpartum" psychosis or clinical insanity.
I agree that LC was economically, & perhaps socially privileged compared to many other women who've tried to claim insanity on post partum grounds & failed. Social factors such as single parenthood, poverty etc are known risk factors that can exacerbated PND. However that said, legally each case turns on its own facts. LCs case is important because it highlights the unique mental health challenges faced by women. I only wish poor & marginalised women received the same attention when facing the criminal courts.
Please note, I haven't ever said "the system failed" Lindsay. That's just a cliche. "The system" isn't what's on trial in Plymouth County, Massachusetts -- Lindsay Clancy is. I'm not the one trying to turn the trial into a symbolic referendum on other political, cultural, or economic issues. This article is 6,000+ words on Lindsay's own criminal culpability or lack thereof, and the elements the government must prove to establish her guilt.
It can be used as cliche it's also an evidence based phenomenon. The mental health issue most commonly diagnosed in males is substance use disorder (sud). SUD gets consistently more fiscal allocation from major institutions like NHS etc than post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Anxiety, depression, PTSD are most common in females. In fact females are at double risk of PTSD compared to men.BPD research is very scarce & this disorder is also largely diagnosed in females.
We can see LC as exceptional, a rare case of a woman going mad, not getting the treatment she needs, or we can see her as part of a broader pattern. Certainly LCs not the only woman to have killed her children due to PPP or to be publicly hated so vociferously. Lots of women deemed by the courts, fully legally responsible for killing their kids, have had more extreme symptoms than LC combined with poverty, lack of community support etc (Carol Corondao etc).
I have a tendency to see big picture. It's just how my brain works. The granular is important is the courtroom. Beyond that, phenomenon are always nestled in social context.
Women can certainly be bad, evil etc. They can do crimes for selfish/ ego driven reasons- no argument. I'm interested in the differences in men vs women's offending and if those differences can be located in; gendered expectations, institutional responses, knowledge (what do we know/ how do we know it), the legal system itself. This stuff can help us prevent & intervene early.
It is women who insist they are equal to men, until they are held accountable for their actions to the same degree as men, and then they are "just a girl."
By your logic, and assuming you still believe women are equal to men, men should be excused for rape when they are overcome by their hormonal demand that they reproduce.
Quote: "I do not understand how the system 'failed' Lindsay Clancy if she could access practically everything the system offered her - other women rarely have such luxury."
Response: While you're correct that many Americans wouldn't have the access she--a nurse--had to our system's care, in this case the "system" provided Clancy with a slew of powerful anti-psychotic drugs and "benzos" (some of which were prescribed after a 15-minute Zoom call). These were given to her by several different psychiatrists who didn't communicate with each other about the potential overall impact of their prescriptions on their client's mental health.
Per the testimony of several witnesses, Clancy regularly asked for help and expressed concerns about thoughts of harming her children, that she wasn't herself, etc. which is how/why she received these drugs. The treatment she received, while available, seems to have been ill-advised and provided to her in a haphazard manner.
The jury would need to decide whether sleep deprivation, the aforementioned drug cocktail, and a uniquely bad case of postpartum depression could reasonably result in an otherwise normal mother having a psychotic break. If the jury were to decide in the affirmative, it would not excuse the mother of murder, but it could result in a legal "not guilty by reason of insanity" verdict.
Quote: "It is funny to me that you always point out how Jeffrey Epstein adult victims/accusers had the agency in their own lives (work, career, travel, other romantic and sexual relationships) in so many aspects and yet they claim Epstein and his people allegedly 'enslaved' them mentally so they could not walk away or stop the alleged abuse. You dont buy their explanation and say that they had a choice in that situation and simply refuse to take accountability for their own actions. That they call certain sexual acts rape even though 20 years ago they perceived them as consensual. Yet you fail to see the same pattern with Clancy who was privileged enough and in a perfect position to seek help for her alleged mental issues, she practically checked every box to be able to help herself but yet should be considered not capable of taking responsibility for murdering her own children."
Response: These are very different scenarios. Many of the most famous alleged Epstein victims: (a) are plaintiffs; (b) don't have to face an adversarial process; (c) have an obvious motive for rendering previous consensual acts (made up or real) as abuse, as well as lawyers with the same motive; (d) have very little to no credible evidence supporting their claims of abuse. Maybe if you want to compare a specific alleged Epstein victim with Clancy, we could have a more useful comparison, but these are very different cases overall.
As mentioned, Clancy did seek help for her alleged mental issues, and she received it. Regardless of her relative "privilege", was the "help" she received in this specific situation helpful or harmful to her mental state? I would personally vote harmful. And that, among the other factors I mentioned, could influence the jury's verdict.
Quote: "Not to mention that sick men who much more often kill their whole family and later commit suicide receive absolutely zero sympathy or support from the people (besides maybe some incels or redpillers). And this is good they get little mercy from society. Same should be applied here."
Response: I would generally disagree here, as well (respectfully). There is a reason men would get less sympathy as a default, as their brains and hormones aren't physically impacted by pregnancy and its aftermath.
Having said that, I don't believe it's "good" that "[men who commit similar acts] get little mercy from society". In my experience, condemning others and/or taking vicarious joy in punitive action doesn't do any good for anyone, including the victims and society-at-large.
Ya! what she said!
Thank you, Tracey, for proving once more that you are a decent fellow who can use his brain. Had never heard about this case, what with not living in your country and not almost ever listening to what was once called "chronicle" news. Do not have any wish to look into it further, your description and the Resnik video are enough.
The reactions of a certain subset of the population (as shown by a certain subset of your readers too, here below, alas) are appalling.
I am so sorry for this world and this age, where very simple obvious things, the things that hold our civilisation together, need to be repeated so often and still fall on the deaf ears of screaming mobs.
Thank you again for doing this work.
And incidentally, it has gotten to the point where, every time I meet a new person born after 1980 (not that there are none of the previous classes, but they tend to be less online), a new person of either sex or the alternates also, I find myself wondering, "Will you reveal yourself as one of "those"?
To be honest, it is a little like living in The Body Snatchers universe.
Good work, Michael. I haven't been following the case, but I do have some personal acquaintance with psychosis and how it can affect those we love (a woman, actually, which seems relevant here) - it's a terrible, heartbreaking, diabolical illness. The often internally-coherent nature of the delusions is one of the cruelest symptoms because, for the sufferer, what feels like sanity and reason is the very thing that prevents them being able to relate to those others who, not psychotic, still care about them and want better things for them. And so they often isolate, secretive in their suffering and delusional state. I've seen it and felt its impact. I have a lot of sympathy for this poor woman, her husband, and her loved ones. It's such an extreme case, so unimaginably sad and awful.
Even if I hadn't had any personal experience with clinical psychosis and delusion, one would hope I could still see my way to a kinder and gentler position on something that I hope none of us ever have to deal with.
Making this terrible tragedy into a weapon in a dumb "gender war" is beyond heartless.
There is no evidence she actually had PPP or even PPD.
NONE at ALL?
No. None at all.
Well FFS what is Michael on about then? It seems that the fellas might have a point or two. Maybe not about the accused, but about the rather gleeful behaviour from a certain section of society around the trial.
Now I have to rethink all my life choices
The gender war is a result of feminist women donating a million dollars to a confessed female child murderer.
You don't believe evil exists.
It's called PIETY, and it exists.
Why did she choose evil?
Why did Eve take the apple?
Ask GAWWWD-duh !
I don’t know.
There is no bio-psychological excuse for mass child murder. Nothing prevented the woman from calling for help. Postpartem depression is a euphemism for "I hate parenting," and another example of the medicalization of everyday life.
Uh... she did seek help, REPEATEDLY. Including by surrendering herself for numerous hospitalizations in the weeks and months before the killings. Because she was extremely fearful of her rapidly deteriorating mental state. Thanks for proving my larger point, though.
That’s not help, then, is it?
Is there good science backing the idea that such things help?
I think you just made Michael's point for him.
Tracey fans like his bombast and his dislike for being challenged.
So she chose murder/prison over parenting? Wouldn’t divorce have been easier?
Men are prima facie protectors, Michael. It's an evolutionary DNA precursor, so try to understand the lymbic brain reaction to three dead kids. But your points are well taken, that is, the biologically objective attempt to discern this woman's spiral into madness without animus or overarching rational perspective. It's a horror show, stem to stern, and there is no excuse for men to exploit it or women to celebrate it, which they are, dressing in pink and standing in solidarity with an unspeakably brutal crime, no matter the circumstances.
If you obstinately refuse to engage in any higher-order reasoning beyond whatever sensations are produced by a "limbic brain reaction," you might as well just be an ape. (Or a literal human baby.) It's not something to be so self-congratulatory about. But the people who do this seem really, aggressively certain that THEY'RE the ones who've achieved some kind of profound moral insight.
I agree. But the point still stands relative to a subterranean cognitive predisposition. It's no different than the maternal instinct, eg, mom lifts car to save child, or the social consensus and emotional outpouring of a child stuck in a well. Base instincts are always there, despite our rational meandering.
Resnick is a dazzling example of the eminent expert who can be rooked as easily as anyone else.
Lindsay Clancy is not now and never was psychotic, in my view--the view, of course, of a mere human being, not an expert, not an investigative journalist--just a woman who's seen women like Clancy before, though most of them are just the sorts of bosses or neighbors you really don't want to have.
When they are mothers like Clancy, they do much of what Clancy has done though almost none of them go quite as far.
Clancy, with her resources and her own network within the world of medical providers, couldn't find one competent pharmacological psychiatrist to work with carefully and compliantly over the course of as many months as necessary to get her head straight?
No, actually she couldn't, because what she has isn't fixable by drugs or talk therapy or having mom sleep next to her during one of her escalating "crises."
The appropriate words for Clancy are most usefully drawn from theology but they're not legally or medically appropriate so we'll leave them out. Medicine doesn't wrangle too effectively with her either, because people like her are pretty rare, overall, and they're not treatable. They're the sorts of people best culled from society.
She has a miswiring of the brain. I suppose one of the Cluster B diagnoses would fit best. She's not an Andrea Yates. She's not a woman who was ever in the grip of psychosis.
She murdered her children ruthlessly, deliberately, in a way that caused each of them maximum terror, and for any dying person it was an eternity of agony and terror until they were dead. Those minutes it took to kill them were a horror, and Clancy did it clear-eyed with rage against them and all of her family.
I understand it's hard to grapple with a woman and mother being able to do that and not be raving mad. But she is, unfortunately, a true example of evil and evil is not madness. It is something incurable.
Ahh the dreaded cluster B disorders. Did you know in women diagnoses, like Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) have their eitology in TRAUMA. Childhood trauma. In other words, adult women with BPD diagnosis were once severely abused/ neglected kids.
Kids grow up, then we hate them? When does the hate start? What's the cut off? As aoon as they're legally deemed adult? What magic event occurs at 18 to sever the compassion?
Do we hold special animosity if traumatised kids are female? The medical/ psychiatric establishment most certainly treats them poorly, evidenced by BPD being the most stigmatised mental illness. BPD women are routinely told " you're attention seeking" and "you're untreatable", " go kill yourself". 90% of those diagnosed as BPD are female. And guess what Childhood trauma is a strong predictor of adulthood PSYCHOSIS, no matter the diagnostic label. Do you hate abused/ neglected girls so much that you'd sooner call them satan? Sound like Salem Witch stuff to me.
And please SAVE IT you're gonna bang on about male defendants. Extensive evidence shows incarcerated females bear disproportionate burdern of mental illness, poverty & victimisation. Men & women commit crimes for vastly different reasons.
Do I wanna see men executed & called Satan? No. Compassion is sorely needed across the entire legal system. With greater focus on rehabilitation. Rarely do individuals require long term incapacitation. If that's necessary, it should be for community safety. Fair to say, men would make up the bulk of this outlier population.
Not necessarily true. 20% of BPD cases have no history of "trauma", childhood or otherwise. This applies fairly evenly to both sexes in cases of BPD - and it's around 48/52 split men/women in terms of total cases by sex.
Jury is very much out on the root cause of BPD with most professionals agreeing that while there may be more than one pathway to developing the disorder, it does seem to be at least partially due to an inborn tendency to experience affect at a greater intensity. They feel emotions more intensely, and are more sensitive to negative interpersonal encounters. There also seems to be a significant "negative bias" in BPD, which can be a problem for reality-testing.
The diagnosis of men with BPD is fairly new phenomenon. Anecdotally I reckon this turn lines up with they/ them no binary stuff. Longitudinal data clearly show a gender bias towards females ib BPD diagnoses. Agee, aetiology is hotly contested. I believe it's a gendered form of PTSD
My takeaway: men are under diagnosed and poorly served by the system. Far too many end up ignored or misdiagnosed until it's too late - or they just throw them in jail.
https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2026-91096-001.html
My numbers are sourced from the mainstream data on diagnoses since 1978.
I do not believe that BPD is "a gendered form of PTSD". I would place my bets on it being a specific neurological profile, with commonalities and/or similar instantiations in males and females.
There is quite a lot of evidence to support your claim about BPD and the "trans" and "non-binary" craze. In fact, many detransitioners have spoken openly about finding out they have the disorder, and how this was either ignored or downplayed by unscrupulous "gender doctors". It's bad stuff, it'll break your heart to hear their stories.
I'm using data from inpatient settings and forensic population. This data show those with severe symptomatology. BPD is ofc spectrum. Agree with neurological profile but these pathways are formed early childhood via, epigenetic effect
Sansone RA, Sansone LA. Gender patterns in borderline personality disorder. Innov Clin Neurosci. 2011 May;8(5):16-20. PMID: 21686143; PMCID: PMC3115767.
Inpatient settings plenty more where this came from
I would also want to push back a little on this idea that females have it worse in terms of metal health outcomes. I'm going to refrain from doing so because to push some "gender agenda" here would be in poor taste and instead I'm just going to recommend philosopher David Benatar's book "The Second Sexism". It'll challenge a lot of what you may or may not believe about being male in today's world.
Thanks will check. I suggest Elinoe Cleghorn Unwell Women
Being hysterical here isn't useful.
Haha gendered tropes. I'm far from hystera. Lol more catatonic
Your self-directed talk ain't helping with your hysteria, methinks.
As you like.
If she had Cluster B, all of her friends and family would've been fed up with her by now bc BPD people are a nightmare to associate with. They wouldn't all be testifying on her behalf, including her husband and his parents. So this seems unlikely.
There are active lawsuits against her providers by Clancy and by her now ex-husband which will of course affect how Mr. Clancy comports himself in public and with reference to his now ex-wife, murderer of their children.
Do you think any of the grandparents wish to admit to anyone, most profoundly to themselves, how badly everyone failed those children killed slowly and deliberately by their mother? Do you think none of them had gotten a little fed up with Lindsay's constant dramas over the course of many months, and how badly they misjudged exactly how far she would go in creating the ultimate tableau of mother driven to the depths of madness because everyone around her "failed" her?
It's too bad so many people of otherwise competent thinking processes have chosen to ignore what is so appallingly plain, and that so many have made a betrayed victim out of a deliberate, ruthless, unrepentant and brutal killer of her own children.
So you think she's a psychopath? Do people like that attempt suicide?
No, I don't think she is a psychopath and I don't think she intended to die. She certainly proved she's an efficient killer when she wants to be. Bad luck for her she ended up paralyzed but she'll milk that for all it's worth for the rest of her life.
Geniuses of the Field of Mental Disorders have a hard time grappling with people like Clancy. They are outside understandable pathways. They're not fixable. Not everyone with that miswiring goes as far as she did; they usually make other people's lives miserable or unpleasant in less appalling but still very damaging ways. They push themselves over the edge. Nothing could have saved those children from her except removing those children from her reach. Even failing to understand exactly what was wrong with Lindsay, the father and the grandparents surely ought to have recognized that the home environment, with Lindsay constantly escalating her dramas, was bad for the children. But she wouldn't let anyone take them for overnight stays. That's one of the great failures of her husband, that he was unable to act as the father his kids needed him to be when they needed him the most.
Ah the old goalposts moving. First it was let us vote, then it was let us run our own businesses, then it was let us erase getting married, because free love baby! Then it was let us kill the babies we create out of wedlock, and now it's let us murder our children and go live in a nice hotel for the rest of our lives, because ya know, we just be crazy. How about No. How about if you post anything related to fantasizing about killing your children on social media, we throw your ass in prison and let you think about your life choices. How about NO to all of this narcissistic garbage death cult they are creating. You would think women in general would see some asinine show like The Handmaids Tale and run in the other direction from all this crap, but instead, they double down, because why not? It's almost like they WANT that "nightmare" to happen. It's almost like we were warned about all this by a guy in the desert ~2800 years ago. It's almost like leftism Is indeed a death cult hell bent on destroying humanity...
Sure, take away our right to vote. That'll solve everything.
Just Another Incel.
More measured analysis from Michael (insert eye-rolling emoji here). I actually agree for the most part, but the ranting style grows very old.
The prosecution’s claim that she faked her suicide attempt is weird and counter-productive. It seems to me the obvious argument for them to make is that she attempted suicide because she felt overwhelming horror and guilt about what she’d done, and that this is evidence of her knowledge that it was wrong. (I think this explanation is actually at least as likely to be true as “voices told her to kill herself” — but I don’t think that it is incompatible with psychosis as the explanation for the murders.)
Unless she threw herself out of a window only 20 feet off the ground or so because she believed it could be argued to be a “suicide attempt” but have a low likelihood of actually killing her
Sorry, don't see it. She jumped headfirst from a second story window, not my first choice when faking a suicide attempt, certainly could have died, and paralyzed herself from the waist down (could easily have been from the neck down, too -- not exactly a desirable outcome). It's possible she was scared about taking her own life (more than she was about killing her children), and therefore took less than foolproof means to do it. The proverbial cry for help that sometimes does end in death, sometimes not. But to see this as some kind of calculated scheme -- no, just don't see that.
She went from executing a deliberate scheme to move her husband out of the house and murder her children - notionally, under “psychosis” - to being so despondent in her right mind over her own most recent actions to attempt suicide, all in the space of time it takes to eat a bag of skittles? Is a “blink and you’re fine” resolution of a psychotic episode consistent with any medicine as we understand it?
She strangled three children by ligature and then decided that her own suicide had to be by fall? And not, say, by hanging, which she had all the stuff for?
1) I didn’t say she was definitely in a psychotic episode. And if she wasn’t — well, people do kill others then themselves quite frequently, alas. Probably even psychotic people.
2) I’m not sure psychosis means you can’t decide to get someone to leave the house first so you can carry out the deed. If you’re convinced you need to kill, you want to make sure you’re able to do that without interference. I don’t believe “psychotic episode” = “inability to plan.”
3) “Fall” is not quite the same as “paralyzing dive on head from second floor window.”
Of course she was convinced she needed to kill
She was also convinced she needed to succeed at killing (and not be stopped by her doctors or her husband) and that she needed to get away with it (hence the “suicide attempt” and insanity plea)
The issue with making an insanity plea to your crime is that you don’t get to point to the crime and say “only the insane would do this” - you can’t benefit, legally, from having committed the very crime you’re on trial for
Putting the “suicide attempt” in quotes doesn’t make your case any more persuasive. And pleading insanity doesn’t (necessarily) mean you were actually sane and just trying to “get away with it.” Sometimes — and no, I don’t know for sure in this case, of course — but sometimes, people plead insanity because it fits the bill.
As you alluded to it’s just a pathetic attempt at a culture war. Because Trump has failed them on every conceivable way, all they have left is to ‘own the libs’ on social media. Liberal women rally in support of X, then we must be for Y. Rinse and repeat
Every murder is a product of misfiring chemicals in the brain. Whether this one deserves special treatment for crossing some arbitrary threshold is up to Massachusetts law, but that does not mean people are obligated to morally excuse her. Her brain murdered three children, and is also the entirety of who she is.
Damm Tracey! Adroit authorship, granular forensic analysis, compassion, scepticism towards the state, it's all here.
I haven't finished yet, gotta get pup to the vet. One early thought; agree prosection expenses should/could have been diverted to prevention/ early intervention. This is the sort of critical lens we need on criminal justice, urgently.
I'll be back later with more thoughts. Take care, it hurts my heart reading about these children's suffering AND the prosectorial spatter fest, that eviscerates traumatised women (business as usual- just look at the rates of mental disorder, victimisation, poverty in the female carceral complex and compare it with community support available to them, gendered expections). This is about more than LC. AND I wholeheartedly support your Epstein related stuff. People struggle with the idea that two things can be true at once.
Other than your intuition and anecdotal observation about how the gender divide is on the judgement of this case, do you have any substantial data to back it up? People have said the same thing about abortion, but in fact there is no such divide. People who are “pro choice” sometimes claim that “pro life” people are just males who have no empathy for women, but when we look at the data we discover that it’s actually not an enormous gender gap and that it tracks other things like political party affiliation more than gender.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/691370/gender-gaps-abortion-reach-historic-highs.
I have no opinion about this case. I have not been following it at all. I do have an opinion on your article, and I didn’t read it all cuz it’s very long and it never provided the data I’d expect for you to lean in so heavily into the gender war stuff. Do you ever provide anything? If you do maybe I’ll read the whole thing. If not, this thing is a mess, especially given how much you hysterically
disparage some people for their logical reasoning. It may have been fine if you didn’t go with the war of the sexes framing without any data backing it up.