Tag: trial

Popular Psychology

The Lindsay Clancy Trial Forces Us to Ask an Uncomfortable Question About Mental Illness

by Torey C. Richards, LMHCLeave a Comment on The Lindsay Clancy Trial Forces Us to Ask an Uncomfortable Question About Mental Illness

I’ve spent a good portion of my career working with people experiencing serious mental illness. I’ve also spent years working in correctional settings, so the intersection between psychology, criminal behavior, and personal responsibility has always fascinated me.

That may be one reason I’ve found myself following the Lindsay Clancy trial so closely.

The Massachusetts mother is on trial for killing her three young children, 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan, in January 2023. Her attorneys do not dispute that she killed them. Instead, the central question of the trial is whether Clancy was legally responsible for her actions at the time.

Her defense argues that she was experiencing severe postpartum psychosis and had lost touch with reality. Prosecutors argue that, although Clancy clearly struggled with significant mental-health problems, she understood what she was doing and deliberately planned the killings.

That distinction has turned this trial into something much bigger than a murder case.

It forces us to wrestle with an incredibly uncomfortable question:

When does mental illness explain someone’s behavior, and when does it change how responsible we believe they are for it?

Mental Illness Doesn’t Automatically Mean Lack of Responsibility

One of the misconceptions I frequently see when cases like this become national news is the assumption that being mentally ill automatically means someone doesn’t know what they’re doing.

It doesn’t.

Millions of people live with depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and other serious mental-health conditions without ever harming another person.

Even experiencing psychosis does not automatically determine someone’s legal responsibility.

That’s part of what makes the Clancy case so complicated.

Clancy had been seeking mental-health treatment for months before the deaths of her children. She saw multiple providers, was prescribed psychiatric medications, and admitted herself to McLean Hospital for inpatient treatment only weeks before the killings.

But the experts who have evaluated her don’t agree about what those facts ultimately mean.

Defense experts have testified that Clancy was suffering from postpartum psychosis, including hallucinations, and was unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of her actions. A prosecution expert has challenged that explanation, arguing instead that Clancy understood what she was doing and killed the children because she believed they would suffer after her planned suicide.

Same woman. Same history. Same horrific outcome.

Different psychological conclusions.

And that’s worth paying attention to.

What Exactly Is Postpartum Psychosis?

Part of the public discussion surrounding this case has also revealed how little many of us know about postpartum mental health.

Most people have heard of postpartum depression. Postpartum psychosis is different.

It is a rare but serious psychiatric emergency that can involve delusions, hallucinations, severe confusion, paranoia, dramatic mood changes, and a loss of contact with reality.

It’s important to say something else clearly:

Postpartum mental illness does not make mothers dangerous.

The overwhelming majority of women struggling with postpartum depression, anxiety, or other mental-health conditions will never harm their children.

We should be able to discuss an extreme case without creating unnecessary fear or stigma around mothers who are already struggling and may be afraid to ask for help.

In fact, if there’s a broader lesson here, I think it should be the opposite: when a new mother says she is struggling, we need to take her seriously.

Explanation Is Not the Same as Excuse

This may be the hardest part of the conversation.

Sometimes when we try to understand why someone committed a terrible act, people hear that understanding as sympathy or even justification.

But psychology asks us to tolerate more complexity than that.

We can grieve three children whose lives were taken.

We can acknowledge the unimaginable suffering of their father and family.

We can also ask whether their mother was experiencing a psychiatric illness so severe that her perception of reality was fundamentally altered.

Those ideas can exist in the same room.

Understanding behavior doesn’t erase its consequences.

But if mental illness truly affected someone’s ability to understand reality or appreciate the wrongfulness of an act, then our justice system has to consider that too. That’s precisely why standards for criminal responsibility exist.

The Part of This Case That Troubles Me Most

Beyond the question of guilt, there’s another part of this story that I can’t ignore.

Clancy was asking for help.

Her medical history presented at trial shows months of contact with mental-health providers before the killings. She reported anxiety, depression, difficulty sleeping and suicidal thoughts. She sought different providers and eventually inpatient psychiatric care.

That doesn’t tell us what the verdict should be.

But as a mental-health professional, it makes me wonder about something larger:

How good are we at recognizing when someone’s mental health is moving from “struggling” to “dangerously unstable”?

Mental-health care isn’t perfect. Clinicians make decisions using the information available at a particular moment. People can appear relatively stable during an appointment and deteriorate later. Symptoms can change. Patients don’t always disclose everything they’re experiencing.

There isn’t always an obvious villain or an easy missed sign.

Sometimes tragedy happens despite people trying to help.

That’s an uncomfortable reality too.

Compassion and Accountability Don’t Have to Be Enemies

I’ve noticed that public conversation about this trial often seems to demand that we choose a side.

Either Lindsay Clancy is a monster who murdered her children or she is a severely ill mother failed by the mental-health system.

Human behavior is rarely that simple.

I don’t know what was happening inside Lindsay Clancy’s mind when her children died. Ultimately, the jurors hearing all of the evidence will have to decide whether the legal standard for criminal responsibility has been met.

But I think the rest of us can take something important from the conversation.

Mental illness can profoundly alter how someone thinks, feels, perceives danger, and experiences reality. At the same time, having a mental illness does not automatically remove personal responsibility.

The difficult work is figuring out where one ends and the other begins.

And maybe that’s why this trial has captured so much attention.

It isn’t simply asking us what Lindsay Clancy did.

We already know what she did.

It’s asking something much harder:

How should we judge a person when we aren’t certain how much of their mind was available to them when they did it?

There may never be an answer to that question that feels completely satisfying.

But it’s a conversation worth having.

If you or someone you know are struggling with post partum mental health, please reach out to the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline: 1-833-TLC-MAMA (1-833-852-6262)

Popular Psychology

The Trayvon Martin Tragedy And Psychology, Part Two: Cognitive Bias And Confirmation Bias

by Torey C. Richards, LMHC2 Comments on The Trayvon Martin Tragedy And Psychology, Part Two: Cognitive Bias And Confirmation Bias

Zimmerman Martin 104When we look at the Trayvon Martin case, we have to wonder what was going on in Mr. Zimmerman’s mind the night he spotted Trayvon Martin, an unfamiliar figure, walking through his neighborhood. Instead of looking at this as a race incident, I think it’s important that we take a look at what in psychology is called cognitive bias.

Cognitive bias is something that I find easier to understand than to actually explain, but Haselton, M. G., Nettle, D., & Andrews, P. W. in The evolution of cognitive bias (2005) explain cognitive bias as a pattern of deviation in judgment, whereby inferences of other people and situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion.

Basically, people create their own sense of reality (subjective social reality) based on their perceptions of objective information which influence how they respond and react to situations both mentally and physically. This cognitive bias however can be wrong and lead to poor judgement, wrong interpretations of a situation, perceptual distortions and irrational behavior/reactions.

Confirmation bias on the other hand is when we look for information that confirms what we already believe, even if other information that disconfirms it is also present. For instance, supporters of Mr. Zimmerman and Zimmerman himself will latch on to information that suggest Trayvon had a violence past, used marijuana or was involved in gang activity while Trayvon’s family and supporters will likely relish information that says Mr. Zimmerman was a racist, impulsive or quick to take the law into his own hands.

With little other information about either person, we are likely to come to some pretty strong conclusions based simply on our cognitive biases and confirmation biases alone.

Some cognitive biases are adaptive and help us make decisions faster, especially when a higher value is placed on quick action over accuracy. Others can be learned, generally subconsciously.

There are entire books written on cognitive biases, but the important part is that you have a basic understanding that people often think incorrectly and then act irrationally based on their misperceptions.

Late psychologist Ziva Kunda wrote in her article “The Case for Motivated Reasoning” that “people are more likely to arrive at those conclusions that they want to arrive at” unless they are motivated specifically to make accurate judgements and decisions.

For instance, there’s a study done by psychology professors at Notre Dame and Purdue University that showed that a person carrying a gun is more likely to “see guns in the hands of others”.

In the study, participants were given a toy gun or a foam ball. They were then flashed people across a computer screen holding either a toy gun, a cell phone or something else. The participants with the toy guns were more likely to say that the people on the screen were holding a gun, even when they were not.

In the Trayvon Martin situation this means that Mr. Zimmerman saw what he thought he saw based on his own experiences and mental frameworks. Mr. Zimmerman had stated on several occasions that there had been multiple break ins in his gated community and that “they always get away”. By “they” I am assuming he means burglars or other bad guys, not African Americans, but those who are looking for a racist spin will interpret “they” as meaning African American or black people.

Mr. Zimmerman was looking for Trayvon to be a criminal and thus he saw a criminal, although Trayvon was just walking back to his father’s house from the store and wasn’t involved in any criminal activity. As the neighborhood watchman, Mr. Zimmerman was likely looking for criminal and suspicious activity everywhere and thus was more likely to think someone was a criminal or suspicious even when they weren’t.

Now that Mr. Zimmerman believes he has spotted a criminal, he goes on to do some irrational things based on his cognitive bias that Trayvon is a criminal. He starts following Trayvon, calls the police and then continues to follow Trayvon so that he can give the police an accurate location to find this “criminal”.

Many people want to say that Mr. Zimmerman did what he did on that night because he is a racist, something I can’t say he is or isn’t, but you don’t have to be racist to be prejudice and you’ll be surprised to learn that most of us are prejudice to some extent.

Subconsciously we are more likely to be prejudice towards out-groups, which are people we psychologically do not identify with as part of our group. I discussed in a post I wrote about helping others how this same type of subconscious thinking makes it more likely for us to help those that we feel are similar to us in what is called similarity bias. 

Because Trayvon was of a different race, it made it more likely that subconsciously Mr. Zimmerman was even more suspicious of him. In the next post I’ll discuss how social stereotypes predispose most of us to have certain prejudices that then lead us to have different cognitive bias.

Although these subconscious forces are indeed powerful, there is a way we can control them to a degree through what is called “thinking safe” instead of “thinking quick”. When we think quick, we are likely to make inaccurate assumptions and if Mr. Zimmerman thought he had spotted a criminal prowling his neighborhood, he was most likely thinking “quick” and not “safe” and his cognitive biases and subconscious prejudices combined with that probably contributed a lot to the actions he took that night that left an unarmed teenager dead.

What I am getting to is that while race and prejudices probably played major factors into this tragedy, most of it likely came from subconscious psychological factors that were at play.

We will put all this together and wrap it up in part three of this discussion.