“Another Lindsay Clancy” — What You’re Really Saying

**Tony Brueski** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:12)
I want to address something I keep seeing. Headlines, headline drops, a mother, a child, dad. Before anyone reads the second sentence, three words either have already landed in the title or in the comment section or the subheadline.
This is when I say this, you're going to realize you've been seeing this a lot too in the last two weeks. There's three words. Another Lindsay Clancy. Three words. And you feel like, oh, oh, okay. We've identified what happened here right away. Just those three words. And you think, you know, you haven't. You just swapped a woman you've never heard of. For a woman, you already have opinions about. Whatever actually went wrong in that house, the specific medication, the specific doctor, the specific call that got logged and never returned, you decided you already knew. I'm not blaming you. This is what's going on. This is what we're being fed in so many headlines right now. There's three words that make us just stop thinking, Another Lindsay Clancy. Oh, this is an easy one to compare.
No, it's not. We need to stop doing this. What are those three words actually cost and who's paying for them? Well, Lindsay Clancy's case involves specific medications prescribed by specific doctors who made specific clinical decisions. The next case, whatever it may be, because I just I keep seeing these these headlines with cases that have nothing to do with Lindsay Clancy and are not really remotely like Lindsay Clancy, other than the fact that involves the mother and children and usually death of some sort. And all of the factors that lead to there are nothing alike.
The next case involves different medications, different doctors, different decisions. The only thing they share is the part that scares us too much to think past a mother and dead children. So we stop, we stop. And we think we've made a comparison because it's too Icky to really go a little bit deeper. That's not a comparison. A comparison examines two things. It examines this. This examines nothing.
Say what another Lindsay Clancy actually means without the true crime vocabulary. And it's mother who went crazy and killed her kids. Andrea Yates drowned her five children in 2001 for 20 years after that. Every time a mother killed her children, Yates was the name people reached for. Different women, different diagnoses, different failures, didn't matter. Same shorthand. Yates was convicted in 2002 A retrial jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity in 2006 after hearing what postpartum psychosis actually does to her brain. The 20 years since that case, I guess we haven't really taken that into account very strongly or understood it, because we seem more confused about it now than we did in 2006, despite understanding it more.
But what we do have today that we didn't have in 2006 is TikTok, is Facebook, is Instagram, is social media, YouTube, everything. Those things didn't exist back then or they were in their very early infancy.
That case got the conversation right. People heard the difference between psychosis and depression. Heard how a woman that ill could still look under normal conditions, looking functional to everyone around her. Doctors, published papers, advocacy groups, organized around postpartum maternal health screenings and awareness. Twenty years ago, people said they understood, and for a while, some of them actually did. Then, twenty years later, Clancy's case arrived, and we reached for the same three words, like we've never heard any of it. The awareness survived about as long as the news cycle, because it was built on a name instead of an understanding. Now, it's Clancy. The name changes every few years. The laziness is permanent, it seems. They're sorting a new tragedy in a box. They've already closed and scrolled past. The question that would actually matter, what specifically broke here, who specifically missed it, which decision or failure to decide ended with children dead, never really gets asked. The answer doesn't fit the comment or the title, so we don't we don't bother asking. It's just, well, it's like this, and we move on. Evil person, right? Just, yeah.
Why try to get ahead of these things and prevent the actual children from dying by helping the mother when she's begging for help? You know, what crazy world are we living in? We'd want to do that. We'd rather be offended. We'd rather be able to socially pivot and signal to our friends how good we are that we stand up for dead babies. Do you stand up for dead babies? I don't think you stand up for dead babies. I know I stand up for dead babies. Do you stand tall enough for dead babies? That's the real question, because I'm standing tall over here. We kind of agree, but I'm standing even taller for the dead babies. Aren't you? What could you buy? Yeah, this grandstanding bullshit when all of us are pretty much on the same page. Yes, dead babies are bad. No one is pro-dead babies.