Lindsay Clancy -Mother of 3 kills her kids during psychotic episode

[Joshe]

Schizophrenic patients 

[Joshe]

1 hour ago, Emerald said:

I watched an expert testifying earlier today who was talking about why he didn't suspect that she was experiencing a command hallucination.

And he said that, with people who experience command hallucinations there's a tendency to use coping mechanisms to drown them out... like praying. And Lindsay Clancy wasn't doing that.

There's also a tendency for people with these hallucinations to experience them periodically. And it would be uncommon for someone to experience them once and then not again.

He also found it unlikely because she had said that she was experiencing these hallucinations all the way throughout the duration of the 20 minutes, with the external voice repeating the same phrase over and over the entire time.

He may have brought up another point, as well. But those are the ones that I'm recalling.

But he was suspecting that she was committing suicide and filicide... killing her children out of love and because she didn't want to be separated from them when she commits suicide. And I don't know about that explanation.

To me, it seems like that's a reach to assume her motive was to kill her children out of love.

But in that case, she'd still be criminally responsible for their deaths. So, he was in favor of her being seen as guilty. But his reasoning about the motive seemed very speculative.

I just wonder if a certain combo of meds could have produced her particular claimed psychosis. I'm just trying to steelman her position. Either way though, that evidence you highlighted earlier regarding the voices only appearing during that 20 minute window is too suspicious for me to not lean towards lucid intent. Given that, I'm not sure if there's any evidence at all that could be presented to make me lean the other way. It's just too suspicious. 

Edited 1 hour ago by Joshe

[Joshe]

But then again, if it was premeditated, you would think she would have faked command hallucinations more than just in that 20-min window. 

Most people don't drop a con before it's been bought. If it was planned, she probably would have looked into what the standard pattern looked like, you'd think. So, this is something to consider.

Why didn't she just fake the commands later so that they would be consistent with the pattern? 

Also, I'm assuming there was no digital evidence hinting at premeditation. If no, that cuts further in her favor.

I'd like to know what her knowledge of schizophrenia was prior to the act.

Edited 1 hour ago by Joshe

[Joshe]

Holy shit:

This is why we need to know her level of cognitive sophistication or whatever. It could answer if she's even capable of this fake. This seems like it would be a pretty sophisticated fake, so if she or her husband isn't cognitively capable of that, then I'd learn her way, I think. 

Edited 1 hour ago by Joshe

[Emerald]

40 minutes ago, Joshe said:

Holy shit:

This is why we need to know her level of cognitive sophistication or whatever. It could answer if she's even capable of this fake. This seems like it would be a pretty sophisticated fake, so if she or her husband isn't cognitively capable of that, then I'd learn her way, I think. 

Wow! I hadn't even thought through the fact that she would know a lot about postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis as a delivery nurse. AND she's looking up extra information too.

I get the steel manning perspective... and I think that's important to keep in mind. Maybe she was looking up that information to ask questions about herself.

But that seems to fit quite well with the setting up evidence to fake it perspective, very strongly.

And if she's very sophisticated, she may even think to vary the pattern a bit to create doubt about her faking it through expert knowledge... but getting close enough to where it looks like she has something going on that looks like postpartum psychosis, auditory hallucinations, and some other diagnosis that's unclear.

Truthfully, she just needs to know how to answer most of the questions correctly. So, it's honestly not that sophisticated of a ruse. And any decent liar could pull it off, if she knows how people in psychosis would generally answer and behave.

[Joshe]

21 minutes ago, Emerald said:

Truthfully, she just needs to know how to answer most of the questions correctly. So, it's honestly not that sophisticated of a ruse. And any decent liar could pull it off, if she knows how people in psychosis would generally answer and behave.

But she's not performing the standard script of how people in psychosis would generally answer and behave. That's what would require sophistication if this were a ruse. Sophistication or either just be dim-witted or maybe lacking knowledge. Or maybe she thought blaming it all on the meds would be sufficient. 

If she actually has in-depth knowledge of how psychosis presents and looks over time, and if she was faking psychosis, why wouldn't she just run the standard script? She spent 3 years under psychiatric supervision and never once decided to claim hearing voices. That's odd. So if it is a ruse, it seems like a sophisticated one. That, or it's not a ruse. 

 

Edited 26 minutes ago by Joshe

[Joshe]

Shit, I didn't even think about sincere confabulation.

"Heilbrun's version isn't a three-year performance; it's a one-time reframing: a devastated survivor, waking paralyzed in a world where she killed her children, reaching once for the culturally legible explanation — and possibly believing it now."

The no-recurrence problem that Heilbrun called "very unusual" for real psychosis: fully explained — confabulated voices don't recur because they were never generated by a psychotic process, only by a meaning-making one, and the meaning only needed making once. Every piece of evidence that the fake theory couldn't absorb, confabulation absorbs frictionlessly.

There's no test that separates "sincerely misremembered voice" from "real voice" three years later. The confabulation is stored as a memory of a real event. Even she can't audit it — that's the whole phenomenon."

Edited 19 minutes ago by Joshe