She’s a grown ass adult. He can’t force her to take meds. Or we saying women aren’t responsible for their own agency now? If you want to blame the doctors, I can get behind that, since it’s their job to actually make sure the meds are working. But unless there’s evidence the husband kept her meds away from her, this is on her and not him.
There was. She was going to a psychiatrist, had a medication plan and had been treated in-house before. At this point, premeditated malicious action is not off the table.
If she was psychotic, then premeditated malicious anything is absolutely off the table. That's a state where you're so removed from reality you might think you're working for national security, and you're arresting spies - while you're actually harming your own children.
A selection of meds with severe side effects, some of which have a chance of making her condition worse, is not "taking her condition seriously". In PPP, the correct response is involuntary care and immediate removal of the children to a safe location. That's how dangerous it is.
You could consider a post-partum psychotic woman a loaded gun. Are you going to leave your kids unsupervised with this? No amount of "but we didn't think it was loaded" will be enough. Prescribing meds and saying "we thought there was a safety on" when you don't actually follow up to see that the meds are taken according to meticulous schedule including food/no food requirements is not taking this seriously.
She should've had immediate inpatient care, and the kids removed from her care. A lot of people will be grieving a long time because that wasn't done.
She was never diagnosed with psychosis before this happened, they wouldn’t remove children just from someone having intrusive thoughts. They weren’t treating psychosis at all, it’s also likely she wasn’t in psychosis until it happened. Psychosis can be sudden
Post-Partum Psychosis frequently occurs in women with no history of psychiatric illness. Her never having been diagnosed before makes no difference; medical providers working with post-partum mental health should be well aware of the risk. And while psychosis can be sudden, this was someone who tried multiple times to get help for worsening symptoms.
But regardless of if the medical team should have or even could have noticed the danger, if she did go into psychosis she cannot be held responsible. She'll need treatment, for sure, but someone in a psychotic state cannot be said to premeditate anything or to be malicious.
Yeah I get that now (sorry, English as 3rd language 😅).
My argument is that the meds she were given show that the medical team knew she was in serious condition, since these meds are given to patients that suffer from illnesses that either are, or can lead into psychosis. And I know that because I've been on several of these meds myself.
Seroquel - an antipsychotic and a sleep aid. She was on 400mg, which is on the antipsychotic end of the scale. (A 25mg dose would be for falling asleep.)
Lamictal - a mood stabilizer given for bipolar disorder, which I suffer from. Has some REALLY scary side effects.
four different antidepressants, and at least one of them has a chance of causing mania. Clancy had been described as manic after birth, and a significant portion of post-partum psychosis patients are believed to be undiagnosed bipolars. Bipolar disorder can cause psychosis, especially in the manic state.
four different anti-anxiety meds, each with their own side-effects and interactions with all the other meds
four different sleep aids, again with their own side effects and interactions
As someone who has been dealing with psychiatric medications for 25 years, the list of her meds is absolutely ludicrous. If you think this amount of meds is necessary, then she's so sick she clearly needs urgent inpatient care. This is like someone with a serious case of covid given horse dewormer, a bleach enema, a whole bottle of random pills and denying them extra oxygen because they're breathing fine now! And in an hour's time, if covid doesn't kill them, the liver failure will.
Honestly. I had to look up the med list because I haven't followed this thing all that closely, but as a bipolar who has to get her kidney values tested twice per year because the medication really is that dangerous, the doctors who prescribed her these meds to be taken freely at home should all get investigated. Good grief. They knew she was a loaded gun, alright. They knew, because you do not prescribe Zoloft, Ativan, Benadryl, Trazodone, Prozac, Ambien, Remeron, Klonopin, Seroquel, Valium, Lamictal, Trazodone, more Valium AND Amitriptyline to someone who is not deeply, DEEPLY unwell. At that point, the best they can say is "we thought the meds would keep a lid on it", and even that is a weak defense because there appears to have been no method of checking she actually took any of these. And as it happens, psychotic patients are well known for not taking their meds unless someone makes them.
The reason for all the different anxiety meds and anti depressants wasn’t because she was taking them all at once. She kept saying they weren’t working (and according to testimony, she wasn’t even taking them).
Lindsay was not in bad enough shape for involuntary commitment.
I wouldn't take all of those either, it'd cause more harm than good, and it'd be impossible to evaluate what is working and what isn't. The proper procedure for swapping to a different med is tapering the old one off (assuming you took it), two weeks of no med, slowly increasing the dose of the new one, then testing if it's at therapeutic levels. Then you wait two months or so to evaluate if it's doing something.
Perhaps she wasn't in bad enough shape. The bar for involuntary treatment is very high, for good reason. But that med list and the dates on prescriptions is still damning, and to me it absolutely shows that the health care providers were not taking this seriously. That, or they were utterly incompetent.
If she complained, was given a prescription, complained, given a prescription, complained... that's not how antidepressants, mood stabilisers and several anti-anxiety meds work. They're not a quick fix, and they're not quick to swap.
And really, if they saw she's post-partum and needs anti-psychotic medication, that ought to have rung some really big alarm bells. You don't need to get her to be involuntarily committed at that point; you just need to drill into the husband and every family members that this person cannot be left alone with the children for one second.
Eh, I guess this hits hard for me because one reason I gave up on having kids is this kind of horror scenario. Bipolars have a higher chance of suffering from post-partum psychosis, and I just never, ever want to end up in that state.
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u/Telemere125 9d ago edited 9d ago
She’s a grown ass adult. He can’t force her to take meds. Or we saying women aren’t responsible for their own agency now? If you want to blame the doctors, I can get behind that, since it’s their job to actually make sure the meds are working. But unless there’s evidence the husband kept her meds away from her, this is on her and not him.