Reply to Why are people more sympathetic to Lindsay Clancy than Andrea Yates? (Child death mentioned)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm confused. So she was sick enough and able to articulate/present symptoms in order to get her 12-13 drugs, and admitted to McLean? That much we know is true.

...but she *wasn't* articulating/presenting symptoms in order to get the PPA/PPD diagnosis? So the default conclusion is, welp, doctors got it wrong, she was psychotic, and she should walk after murdering her children?

I think she went to Women & Infants in Providence (and why there, btw - nowhere close to Duxbury?), they told her it was GAD only, and when she was told it wasn't PPA/PPD, she spiraled and that's when she self-presented at McLean. McLean (different health system, BTW) came to a a similar conclusion and released her when they deemed her to not be a danger to herself/anyone else.

I totally agree that nobody in their right mind would do what she did. However - if I'm on that jury (and I live in MA, just not in Plymouth County), [b]I'm having a reallll hard time not trusting the experts that treated her[/b] and going with their assessment as legitimate. I can think that she had MH issues that don't absolve her of what she did or needing to serve justice for what she did.[/quote]

A lot may hinge on your reaction to those experts when they testify. My guess is that a provider who diagnosed her with GAD only, with these results, is going to be quite defensive of that, including in ways that may be turnoffs to a jury.

After all, in the alternate theory, that person has to explain why they did not notice that this woman was a narcissist or a psychopath or whatever else is being speculated here. If that happened, it would be a pretty significant medical mistake itself.

Psychiatric patients in crisis are often routed away from closer hospitals and towards those with beds. I don't find the fact that she want to something other that the closest/closer hospital suspicious in any way.  [/quote]

Yes beds are in incredibly short supply it is not uncommon to end up far from home and anyway, McLean is considered a very top hospital for psychiatric care so she may have sought it out because she didn’t feel she was getting he help she needed. Everyone should remember that our diagnostic criteria has limitations. For example, there is no specific diagnostic criteria for postpartum anxiety. That is likely why she received a GAD diagnosis at one point. It’s a huge flaw and has been flagged by many but it takes many years to get something in the DSM and postpartum anxiety has typically gone under treated for a lot of reasons. There is a great book on it actually the name is escaping me though.

I really think a lot of folks with no mental health training are making a lot of assumptions based on brief mentions of diagnoses from the prosecution that do not give the full picture. Any clinician knows that sometimes our criteria and available diagnoses do not perfectly fit the person presenting. And also that mistakes in diagnosing are made all of the time especially in a postpartum situation with a lot of rule outs. She was clearly not in her right mind and it blows my mind that people are trying to say otherwise.

People here also seem to have a perception of psychosis that is very inaccurate. Many have probably only interacted with severe mental illness with someone on the street with a particular type of psychosis happening. Sometimes delusions are quite quiet and impossible for the person experiencing them to determine what is happening. They are completely unaware. If she had fallen deeper it may explain why she had been raising flags earlier but stopped. Frankly based on my experience it all makes sense. The mental illness got worse and she was now in a state where she couldn’t decipher between which often looks like hiding it - she likely later would have said if this didn’t happen that she doesn’t really remember this time (now she might say that too but folks will be suspicious)  [/quote]

I agree about the misperception of psychosis. My mom was psychotic for weeks before intervention. I knew something was really wrong with her but didn't have the language to tell anyone. To this day I don't understand why it took my dad and other relatives so long to see the severity-I think it was just too hard for them to process how far gone she was. They didn't want to see it. During that time only one person, one of my mom's friends, commented that something seemed wrong. Everything came to a head when my mom drove to my high school to pick me up during the day and I refused to go with her because I was sure she was going to kill me (I didn't say that to anyone because it would have sounded crazy, I was just a difficult teen about it). After that my dad took her for an evaluation and she was involuntarily committed. And she was receiving psych care during and for years before this episode including weekly sessions with a psychiatrist (who was a total hack and should have lost her license). [/quote]

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