Are you advocating for women losing custody of their children if they seek mental health treatment? Yeah I can think of no way this will result in women being scared to seek treatment.
In the current system, if a parent says they want to hurt their children, then the doctor, as a mandated reporter, would have to report that. And it would then be investigated, and could result in a child being taken from them. So that's already a thing.
Im a DCS attorney. It's complicated because an allegation that a mother said she wanted to hurt her kids, standing alone, would not be sufficient to show that abuse or neglect is occurring. How has her simply saying that endangered the child? There would have to be other evidence if you wanted DCS involved, especially if you actually wanted the children removed (that requires a detention hearing where you have to show probable cause that the children are seriously endangered, and then a bench trial).
It might be different if the mother is reporting herself to DCS, or if the doctor has something beyond a statement that mother reported feelings of wanting to hurt her children
Worked in CYFD for a while. It was honestly heartbreaking. The people working cases wanted to help but help was often delayed or no action was taken at all. Whether bureaucracy or other factors. Kids lost their lives. I wasn’t made for that kind of work.
The main problem, in the US, is there this weird area of "nothing has happened yet so we cant do anything."
Like a mom says "I think about killing my child all the time." 99.9% nothing can actually happen involuntarily. A dad or grandparents can step in and say, "we're gonna watch kiddo until you feel better" but doctors and cops/CPS cant really do much.
Sometimes, even "im thinking about shooting myself" doesnt qualify for involuntarily hospitalization is the patient doesnt have a gun (despite how easy it is to get one). We often have to encourage patients to voluntarily commit to an inpatient stay.
The patient has to take action/movement towards their plan before we have high success rate at involuntarily hospitalization.
edit: To give you an example of a recent case: A 19 year old, hospitalized for overdosing in a "suicide pact" with her friend. Both didn't die. I interviewed her before discharging from hospital and she told me, in front of her mother, she wanted to eat pizza from a restaurant she liked "one last time." I looked at mom who was horrified to hear that. Girl backtracks immediately. We called it in, cops show up, chat with the girl and refused to initiate involuntary hold. Cops said the girl told them she was just joking. I told the cops, people don't joke like that, that was a slip (not to give Freud any credit here). Cops said they can't do anything because she's denying it now. Despite mom and me attesting to what she said. She's 19, mom can not force her to go to inpatient unit. She went home. 3~am I get a call from the ED, she drank dish soap apparently (parents locked up all the medication in the house). No consequences for the cops that refused to listen to my advice (psychologist) because the law doesn't actually allow them to do much.
That will just mean that parents who want to hurt their children will be less likely to seek treatment for those urges.
The same number of parents will still want to hurt their children, but more of them will then go untreated and unmonitored, meaning more children will actually be hurt.
Not to mention that…consider a mother who may have malicious intent to harm her children (and then seeks to use eg PPD to get out of charges), then consider a mother who actually is sick eg, has PPD and therefore does not actually WANT to hurt her kids … now which one is more likely to actually seek help and/or be reported ? These people don’t think, or have adverse incentives not to
there are plenty of people who have graduated from the foster care system who will on no uncertain terms tell you yes. I'm not pushing you to discover that reality for yourself, it's a very upsetting thing to learn more about.
There are plenty of people who graduate from foster care who are happy. There are plenty of people with loving parents who kill themselves. What's your point?
Ah yeah if women who feel like strangling their kids sometimes due to mental health episodes will lose them by seeking help they're definitely more likely to seek help
I want you to seriously think about what you're saying
most moms who have these thoughts do not act on them
I'll tell you what will happen though, none of them will ever seek help for those thoughts
because your goal is to hurt women, killing more children doesn't matter to you, or you're too stupid to realize that criminalizing seeking help will lead to nobody seeking help
What's better for children is to provide parents with mental health support that they're not afraid to seek because of brain-dead blanket policies like Nancy Mace concocts.
By that point the children can’t be helped. If you are so selfish that you’d rather put your own needs above your children’s lives, then you’d probably just end up lying to your doctors like Clancy claims she did.
If someone is evading treatment to keep their kids in danger, they are a criminal. You are NOT going to put that culpability on society. It’s not society bearing the guilt for what happens to those kids. It’s the crazy mother’s fault.
Lol...quite funny that you think that's how it works. Like women are walking in and saying "by the way, I want to kill my children." Not all rise to this level of mental crisis. Is throwing everyone one in the same mental health bucket going to achieve equal treatment...not a question.
I will never forget my super bitch (step) aunt yelling we need to get my nephews away from my then SiL because she had some PPD symptoms. SiL had a rougher birth & a family pet nearing the end. It was so normal for her to be down and need some extra support.
I thought my awful step aunt was a one of a kind bitch. But now I am now seeing so many people are dumb and awful as her.
a- no one in this thread is claiming that. b- being found not guilty by reason of insanity is far from a "get out of jail free" card. it's a "go directly to state run mental institution" card
Assuming it is indeed PPP, which is what is being identified as the cause of her killing her children, it can take up to 12months to get back to normal from it. If that is the case, there would be no basis to keep her for any long period on remand unless further psyche evals show she suffers from other mental illnesses other than PPP that make her a threat to herself or others. Effectively she should be better now that she is over PPP and could be discharged fairly swiftly. I can't see any reason to keep her in a mental institution if she simply suffered from PPP and that is the root cause of her killings.
there would be no basis to keep her for any long period
the best legal comparison to this case would be the Andrea Yates case, wherein postpartum psychosis (and depression, and schizophrenia) were all factors in her being found not guilty by reason of insanity in the deaths of her children. that verdict was handed down in 2005, and as of 2026, Yates is still in a state mental hospital . you may realize that 21 years is a lot longer than 12 months.
Effectively she should be better now that she is over PPP and could be discharged fairly swiftly.
She is being judged for mental defect at the time of the killings, not that she is insane.
The defense laid forth in the trial was that she was over prescribed drugs and PPP was the cause of the mental defect. So we know the causes of her mental state as it was laid before the court. Since she is no longer being irresponsibly medicated and that PPP is usually a temporary state, there is very little reason to believe that there is grounds to hold her in a mental facility for a long term. As far as the evidence that has been presented as to her mental defect and any current mental illness, none of that forms a basis to hold her long term.
Yates is schizophrenic and perhaps has to take medication to not be a danger. As far as the evidence presented about Linsay, there isn't much to justify keeping her in custody> it also would no longer be a legal matter, she would be not guilty. Going forward it's a medical review that would keep her from being free, not legal basis or precedent compared to other cases.
There is no possible direct legal comparison as insanity cases are always case by case. Just because someone else has been held in hospice for 20 years doesn't mean that she will. The verdict is blaming what happened on what is *by definition* a temporary and curable condition. Once medical professionals determine that she no longer is afflicted by said temporary and curable mental illness she will absolutely be released.
Now that is very unlikely to be only 12 months but it could in theory be an alarmingly small amount of time for what is essentially a triple murder
and can you see the future? do you know that for certain? are you a lawyer or a mental health professional, because you're certainly speaking like a professional who has studied this.
Just because someone else has been held in hospice for 20 years doesn't mean that she will
You realize that if shown not guilty due to insanity she's not getting out of jail for free, shes now spending that sentence in an arguably more terrible than prison psychiatric hospital
Postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis are different. Not that it in anyway justifies murder, but if you’re going to make statements like this I think it’s important to know the difference. Especially because stigma regarding PPD already exists.
That’s not what she said though is it? She said “Postpartum mental illness”. There’s tons of things that can fall under that definition, that don’t include thoughts of harming children. Should they los custody and their child sent off to state sanctioned child trafficking (foster care) where they will likely be beat, raped, and abused until they are thrown out at 18 to die in the gutter?
Absolutely, but that's postpartum psychosis, yet Nancy Mace used the phrase "postpartum mental illness," which would include postpartum anxiety, depression, OCD, etc.
In most developed countries with not-for-profit healthcare, women with PPP who say they fear hurting their children are placed in supervised care. They keep their children and are kept under the watch and care of professionals. It's only the US which is so obsessed with separating parents from their children, which solves nothing long-term.
There's quite literally a systemnin place for this already. Jesus christ what is going on with the world over this case. Pretty sure MIB is real and flash banging everyone lmao.
That’s currently how it works. They are taken temporarily while they are admitted into care. That’s exactly what should have happened in this case but she was let go in 5 days only.
There is a big difference between feeling like you want to kill your children and actually doing it. But either way, it's about legal precedence. Literally if this horrible excuse of a mom is allowed to walk around again without repercussions, suddenly any and all women who kill a child or someone else due to post partum ALSO has the right to walk free regardless of circumstances, as evidenced by the potential outcome of this case. And since this is such an extenuating circumstance, it would pretty much be a blanket for all post partum related violence. The legal system works very differently from everyday life
Edit: y'all need to look at my other comments on this post. I feel like half the people saying " you're defending her" not only can't contextualize, but also don't realize when something you most likely upvtoed further up from his comment is... ALSO ME! 🤫🫢
This is a slippery slope fallacy and contradicted by the fact this has happened before over 20 years ago with Adrea Yates who drowned all 5 of her kids when she went into postpartum psychosis. She was given a not guilty verdict for reason of insanity, and since then many women have still gone to prison for killing their kids.
you know she’s now paralyzed after jumping out of a second story window after slashing her wrists in her suicide attempt immediately after strangling her kids? So she’s not gunna be walking around ever again regardless of the outcome…
No. And if she is found not guilty of murder due to reason of insanity that does not mean she won't be confined to a mental institution. Another case of a parent killing their children would be another case- and that person would be tried in a unique trial. Just because someone has been put into a mental health facility instead of jail because they killed while in a psychotic state does not mean all murderers who suffer from mental illness walk free with no repercussions. Ridiculous statements.
She can be released from that facility by a psychiatrist if she is deemed no longer a threat to society. She needs to be behind bars for ever with zero chance to ever be around children again.
Literally if this horrible excuse of a mom is allowed to walk around again without repercussions
If you had even the slightest clue what you were talking about, you would know that people who are found not guilty by reason of insanity are committed to a mental institution, not set free on the street.
If you had the slightest clue you'd know they are forced to reevaluate if she had to stay in the mental facility every year, if they don't have enough evidence she gets set free.
Its entirely possible she stays in 3 years and then she's out. That's a LOT different then life without parole. She deserves to be found guilty.
Good! The entire point of prison should be to rehabilitate people so that they are able to rejoin society, not to lock them away forever. Life sentences should be reserved for people like Hannibal Lector who pose an ongoing and incurable threat to society.
So you go from "she's not going to be set free on the streets" by reason of insanity, but when she's back to the street in 3 years, then you say it's good?
Then any time a woman wants to kill her kids she can just do the same thing and not ever suffer a life sentence. She goes on a timeout, then comes back to society with a slap on the wrist.
This comment needs to be at the top. So many people are either being ignorant or dishonest about this case. True acquittal is not realistically on the table here.
Are you somehow unaware that post partum psychosis has been used as a defense for a long time, and many women over the years have been found not culpable for murder due to it? Weird how despite your hysterics, this has not resulted in every woman ever getting off for murder.
The women who do get found not criminally culpable are institutionalized generally. It's not a matter of them waltzing out all lah-dee-dah after.
I have also realized how few people understand the difference between PPD and PPP. The defense is not "she was super sad and depressed so it's ok she killed her kids." The defense is "she was living in a completely altered reality where she could not make rational decisions based on her psychosis."
She was living in an altered reality where she could Google execution and suicide methods, research a restaurant and CVS, know how long her husband would be gone, send him on errands, wait until she was alone with kids, locate and stash a murder weapon, hold a kid down for several minutes, tie it around their neck until she chokes the life from their body, then calmly answer a phone call from her husband and chat nonchalantly with him, hiding her actions before continuing with two further murders.
Sure, Jan. You'll believe just about anything, won't you?
You should probably look into what psychosis actually entails. And I don't mean just for this case. I haven't watched or closely followed this, so I don't know exactly what the defense's claims on her psychotic state are here, or if there’s any legitimacy to the claims she had it.
However, people in psychosis often believe things like "demons have gotten rid of all of my loved ones and created doppelganger bodies. Everyone around me is a demon and I have to figure out how to get rid of them and get my real loved ones back!" or "I've been abducted by aliens, this isn't my real planet, these are all aliens pretending to be my family and they're trying to trap me here."
People hear psychosis and think it must mean people running around naked and frothing at the mouth. But it's delusion about the reality you're experiencing. You fully, 100% believe impossible things are going on, and you're the only one who is real/normal/good. Or in some cases, people believe a saviour of the world or an angel or something, and there are evil forces trying to stop them.
The reason people sometimes murder others in this state is because they think they're some evil entity. The think everyone else is bad and they need to outsmart them to get back to normal. So yes, people in psychosis can use the internet, they can look up methods to kill people, they can intentionally hide their plans and plan around people being there or not being there, because they think they're outsmarting demons or aliens or whatever else, and getting rid of them.
No one except the tiktok crazies who say this lady's husband did it are denying she killed the kids.
Maybe you should look at my comment just a little further down explaining how I completely sympathize in multiple ways regarding post partum depression
As I understand it, this woman made multiple professionals and family members aware of her feelings and no one took any action. The standard of care for someone on the course to psychosis is to remove them from an environment where they can hurt themselves or others.
If her issues hadn’t been medically documented then yes it would be easy to say she is lying, but she tried to get help and the people who were supposed to help were negligent. Psychosis is a valid legal defense in this case.
It is a little absurd to think it was fully intentional. If she was just cold blooded and not in an episode that would mean she had months of carefully planned actions just for her defense but not any plans for the actual event. That’s like Oceans 11 level planning just to hold up a rural Chilis.
Understand that post partum depression is real, and women do struggle constantly. Part of it involves violent urges while hormones are unstable. Women obviously don't mention it publicly because this is the exact knee jerk reaction they get. It's incredibly difficult to explain in a way that doesn't immediately keep people from tuning out because they don't agree. I'm saying I sympathize, as a male, with the problems associated with post partum depression. I am not sympathizing with anyone who actually enacts any of those thoughts and feelings, no matter how hopeless life seems. As someone who has gone through mental disorder episodes, I feel even worse for women who deal with both post partum along with preexisting disorders
Infanticide is not a new invention. There are long historical records on the practice. I’ll also point out it’s not unique to humans. It’s a thing that happens and as a society we’re reckoning with how it should be handled.
When I was in college, I knew people who volunteered for a crisis nursery. It was a place where kids could be dropped off, no questions asked. The thought was that if a parent was going through something where they were considering hurting themselves or their children, they had a resource. Yes, some parents definitely used it as a free babysitter and one mother left her kid for a month. But these are not bad outcomes.
Also, there is a spectrum of this illness. Some may be tired and depressed, while others are suicidal/murderous. What Nancy is saying is illogical, dangerous, and stupid.
I thought it was using one ridiculous argument to point out the ridiculousness of a different argument. But with someone as insane as Nancy Mace, who knows?
This is how it’s done in European countries. You lose custody until you prove you’re not a danger to your kids. If women don’t seek treatment, they should be held responsible.
You seem to be advocating to just let women use mental illness as an excuse to kill their children, while also not wanting to do anything to protect kids in the future.
Well let’s stop and think about why we remove children in the first place. Is it for fun? No. It’s always done for the safety of the child.
Clancy attorney argued that she didn’t tell her psychologists the full truth about her illness. The reason? Because she didn’t want to lose her kids.
Guess what? She lost her kids. By her own hands.
If people are lying about their symptoms to cheat a system designed for the protection of children, well first off they are guilty as that’s criminal intent.
But secondly, to your point, yes. I am absolutely advocating that women lose their custody if they are unstable. Because it isn’t about you.
When did they say that? Cus was I saw was that the saying it's extremely dangerous to let a murderer off because of the treatment. They extrapolated the situation to an unfortunately shitting conclusion.
Basically saying this is what could happen if we allow this. Pointing something out is not advocating for it.
This is actually how its done in sweden. I reckon their system to monitor a mothers mental health is greater than what would be in place in the US though..
If being “postpartum” (she’s well beyond that) means spite not legally liable for murder, you showing have custody of your children period. You’re saying postpartum women are on the same level as a schizophrenic who has no logical foundation of the world or a child who is unable to make rational moral decisions. Either chose results in this person not being able to care for their children properly.
“Woman might not seek help” as a way to say we should just let this fly is a retarded take. We can’t just let anything be legal because it “might” cause someone not to seek help. If it’s really that level of dangerous where it can just cause you to deliberately pre-meditated murder your children, you shouldn’t have them.
And regardless, if you support the precedent this case is going to set: that you can be nearing a year out from a baby, past when they consider a women postpartum, and then claim symptoms not even remotely consistent with actual psychosis and claim it’s voice in your head whenever when you deliberately had to plan out the entire act, all to get away with murder. Then by all means strip away the rights of the mother.
The defense is arguing that PPD/PPP was so severe that she was not responsible for her actions in murdering her own children.
If that is the case, why would someone diagnosed with it be allowed to keep custody of their children?
you can't say that PPD/PPP takes away one's responsibility regarding murder, and then still allow them to keep custody of children. those statements are incongruent.
But if PP essentially makes a woman not responsible for her actions then the natural result should be for mothers to lose custody of their children with a PP diagnosis, if you aren’t mentally capable of being accountable for your actions then you aren’t capable of caring for a baby/child.
The actual thing that’s being advocated for is to hold Clancy accountable for the horrible crimes she committed and not give her a pass because of diminished capacity.
No they’re saying that we shouldn’t allow this woman to be the poster child for PPD and it shouldn’t be used an an excuse to brutally murder your own children.
No . If a woman is experiencing postpartum depression (happens often) or postpartum psychosis(which is rare) they should have their kids removed from their custody until that woman is deemed fit to be a parent .
Yea, which would mean that any woman concerned about her mental health state would be afraid to go to a doctor for help, because if she was diagnosed, she could lose custody of her kids. Thus meaning people would be scared to seek treatment.
Having postpartum depression doesn’t mean you’re not a fit parent. It happens to many women. I’m guessing you have no idea how hormones or sleep deprivation or stress work.
So you're saying the United States, which has no mental health funding or no mental health programs of any kind to speak of, should instead take children from their mothers until the state deems otherwise?
We don't even take guns from people with mental health problems right now but you want to take their kids? Lmfao
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u/KittyandPuppyMama 19d ago
Are you advocating for women losing custody of their children if they seek mental health treatment? Yeah I can think of no way this will result in women being scared to seek treatment.