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(Content warning: mental illness, suicide, homicide)
I'm sure by now a lot of you have heard of Lindsay Clancy, the woman with "postpartum psychosis" who killed her 3 children before attempting to kill herself. (She's all over the national news, so idk if she counts as a "private citizen" or a celebrity.)
Mental illness is real, but so is over-diagnosis, and to ignore either is a grave mistake. Psychosis can be a normal part of the human experience—especially under stress. When I was 17, about a month after my mom died, I thought "the devil" was gonna take my life too. I had a brief episode where I thought someone was trying to break into my house and kill me. I locked myself in the bathroom and tore the screen off the window trying to get out without the "intruder" noticing. When that didn't work, I called a friend and asked her to come over and see what was going on. Guess what? No one hauled me off to a mental ward. No one slapped me with a lifelong diagnosis or crammed a bunch of pills down my throat. People sat and listened and comforted me. Have we forgotten how to do that? How to care for each other?
Contrary to popular belief, the human brain is not a machine that's supposed to be perfectly logical 24/7. It's also got a "breaker switch" to prevent overload. We're supposed to have imagination and feelings and coping mechanisms that "don't make sense." If we all lived in total reality, THAT would be insanity.
Our culture takes an overly masculine approach to emotions. To most people, feelings are something to be argued with, to be analyzed and controlled rather than accepted. Any feeling that challenges the status quo is stuffed down with therapy and medication.
Lindsay Clancy was on TWELVE psychiatric medications at the time she killed her children and attempted to kill herself. I've stayed in 3 different mental hospitals, and I've never seen anyone who was that heavily medicated. The so-called "doctor" who did this to her needs to be stripped of his license and thrown in prison for murder.
Don't listen to the fear-mongering media. Motherhood is NOT dangerous. Women's bodies are NOT broken. Don't make your family planning decisions based on the lies of evil men who want to control you.
With this case, I think we need to have a serious conversation about the psychiatric drugs she was prescribed and how they could have affected her mental state. No one just wakes up in a sane state of mind and decides to strangle their 3 children and jump out a window. Something went very wrong here. This case is horrific.
This is awful and so sad. I was listening to a podcast by the Huberman lab with Dr. Chris Palmer. He mentioned how a lot of psychiatrists prescribe many medications to people who they diagnose or misdiagnose a lot of times instead of looking at the root cause and he also talked about how he treated a lot of his patients by changing their diet completely and instead of being on 7 meds they went down to one. Honestly I have been telling people this for ages, that in todays healthcare systems, doctors only have 5-10 mins to see patients and a lot of them don’t have time to sit down and ask questions to understand what's going on and that many medications 100% have severe side effects alone so imagine taking them all together.
I think another piece of this puzzle that’s getting lost is frankly, how her family/husband failed her and their children. This was a wealthy family, there’s no reason why they couldn’t have ordered delivery or gotten a caregiver to be there so she was never alone with the kids. The husband knew she was not supposed to be left alone with those children and what did he do? He went and grabbed takeout. I can’t imagine the pain he’s feeling but the truth is, he messed up. He knew how sick she was and didn’t take it seriously enough, although I agree that the cocktail of meds probably had something to do with it.
Regardless, what I see all the time is a woman’s mental health not being taken seriously. Your wife is severely depressed? Time to pressure her into sex and call her a lazy slob. Your husband is severely depressed? You need to be more understanding and take up a second job if he can’t pay the bills.
I didn't know these details but I saw some headlines. Holy shit that's messed up. I'm sorry women on here experienced this kind of over/wrong medication too. They're straight up just experimenting on people. I have a schizophrenic relative who took a medication that almost killed him. Made him suicidal, gain weight, ED, and fucked his body all up. Now he wont take any medication as this experience was so severe, it pretty much affirmed his paranoid delusions.
Wow! FDS really is the last sane place on earth. I'm so happy to see a place where women can talk about their horrible experiences with psych meds and not be shamed for it. I have had two cousins and one aunt commit suicide- all were on SSRIs. When I was on SSRIs I, too, became suicidal for the first time in my life. And like many others, I started off with one diagnosis (mild depression), but when meds were added on and side effects started happening, the diagnoses started piling up. Suddenly I was depressed, anxious, manic depressive, bipolar, borderline personality, schizophrenic, insomniac... and on and on and on! I wasted years of my life letting docs experiment on me. When I finally dropped the meds, my life improved dramatically. I don't believe any of those diagnoses were accurate for me- they were purely due to the meds. It's so good to finally be free.
I thinks some people get over-diagnosed, and get over-medicated. And I say that as a person on an SNRI. If I had been on twelve medications like that I'd probably have lost my mind, too. Sad situation.