Lindsay Clancy's Suicide Call Ended With WHAT?

**Tony Brueski** (0:00)
This is The Big Breakdown, a long look back at some of the biggest stories we're covering for you at the Hidden Killers Podcast and True Crime Today. This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Drake.

**Tony Brueski** (0:17)
Lindsay Clancy's murder trial is getting underway in Plymouth. Both sides agree that she took the lives of her three children. The only question is whether postpartum psychosis made her criminally responsible. That is the big question. And today we're going to do a big psychological breakdown of this case. Been very much looking forward to this. We're going to tackle it in three different lanes. We're going to talk first about what is postpartum psychosis because it is different than postpartum depression. It's different than the baby blues. It's different than just turning a frown upside down. We're going to dive into that because that's the core of this case and understanding the main core elements is rather important to decipher a case and work through it. Then we're going to talk about Lindsay Clancy herself, the clinical picture, what was going on with her specifically. We're going to dive into all that. And then also, why is it so hard, it seems, for the court system to understand mental health and the community as a whole to fully grasp this? And will a jury of 18 of her peers be able to come to a conclusion at the end of the day and a verdict? That is all in store for you today. We welcome your questions, your comments, all of them in the comment section on Substack YouTube, Facebook, X, wherever you're watching us.
Please weigh in. Shavaun Scott, psychotherapist and author is who is with us to help us break this whole thing down, along with Robin Drake, retired FBI special agent, for the Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program. Let's start here. 80 percent of new mothers get some version of baby blues, if you will. That is, I'm going to say broadly, some version of it. One in seven gets categorized into postpartum depression. One in two per thousand get psychosis. People treat those like the same condition if they don't quite understand it, like it's one with a different volume.
In our interest of understanding psychosis, postpartum psychosis specifically, is psychosis even part of the spectrum of postpartum depression or is it a completely different animal, Shavaun?

**Shavaun Scott** (2:33)
Absolutely different animal, absolutely different. This is one of the things I'm most passionate about because psychosis runs in my family.
I have a very deep awareness and understanding of it because it's something I've really focused on and studied for my entire career and even years before I was a therapist as a kid, I was always trying to figure out why is my aunt so weird?
But yeah, it's a completely different animal. Baby blues is mainly caused by fatigue. If you've had a kid, you know how exhausted you are. You're not sleeping. You may be up most of the night. Breastfeeding takes a toll, the hormones are going crazy and baby blues is completely normal. Now, when you move into postpartum depression, that's a deepening of, it's a different quality to it and that's when, I mean, most people have had episodes of depression, but this can be a very deep depression and you want people to get help and support with that because that may go on for months.
Baby blues is a short-term thing when you start getting the kid regulated and you're sleeping and breastfeeding has been resolved and things are fine. It will self-correct.
Postpartum depression, maybe not. They may need some therapy. They may need temporary, some kind of medication to help regulate their nervous system. But it's definitely something that can improve. Postpartum psychosis is a broken brain, completely different. It's not depression, although you can get depression with it. But psychosis is someone that's had a complete and utter break with reality. They're having delusions, thoughts that can't be true. They're often having hallucinations, usually auditory hallucinations. And this can be very extreme, although I can talk about it for an hour, but I'll sort of intersperse as we talk here, so I don't just give a lecture. But one of the key points I want to make, because even people involved in true crime and very educated people don't understand the difference between psychopath and psychotic. And it's so important to understand, because we talk about these things, we throw these words out all the time. Psychopath is a personality type. It's a predator, it's someone with no conscience, and these are people that commit a lot of crimes. Obviously, you know, a large percentage of the prison population is psychopathic. They're people we want to understand and watch out for. So we talk about those folks a lot in True Crime. Psychotic can also be somebody that commits a crime, but the majority of people who are psychotic do not. But that's a brain disease. It's a symptom of something that's underlying, like schizophrenia, bipolar one disorder, and then there are a few other things that can cause it, but it's usually one or the other of those. And when you get psychosis postpartum, this is a category five hurricane. This is an emergency, because this person is no longer thinking in a rational, cogent way. They're not like the rest of us. And when you have that person taking care of a newborn and other young children, terrible things can happen. And that's what we're seeing here with this case.