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242. Lindsay Clancy: 13 Drugs, 7 Prescribers, 3 Dead Children · Radically Genuine

• Dr. Roger McFillin (00:03.97) Welcome to the Radically Genuine Podcast. I am Dr. Roger McFillin. Many of you may be following the case of Lindsay Clancy. And although on the surface this may sound like a true prime two crime. Let's start that over, Ralph. Dr. Roger McFillin (00:23.97) Welcome to the Radically Genuine Podcast. I'm Dr. Roger McFillen. Many of you have been following the case of Lindsay Clancy. Although, on the surface, this may sound like a true crime podcast. It is not. Not in the traditional sense, although I would argue the true crime here is psychiatric care. What you are about to hear today is not an isolated incident. This is standard of care, and you're hearing about it because children are dead. You will not hear about this standard of care for every suicide or the mass shootings that were never traced back to psychiatric drugs. But today, because the record is public and three children are dead, I have the opportunity to explain to you what happens when you enter the mental health system in the United States and many other Western countries. So here are other details if you are unaware. In January of 2023, in a colonial house on Summer Street in Duxbury, Massachusetts, a labor and delivery nurse named Lindsay Clancy killed her three young children. Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. She did it in a 25-minute window. While her husband was out picking up dinner and a bottle of medicine for their daughter's stomachache. Then she cut her own throat and her wrists and went out a second story window. She survived. She's paralyzed from the sternum down. And she's in a courtroom in Plymo Plymouth right now, Massachusetts, in a wheelchair on trial for first degree murder. And if the jury convicts, she will die in prison. That's the case. You have Possibly heard some version of it. What you have almost certainly not heard is what happened in the four months before the afternoon. Seven different psychiatric drug prescribers, thirteen different psychiatric drugs, more than 30 separate prescriptions between September and January. And in case you believe that this is health care. Dr. Roger McFillin (02:50.402) Not one blood test, not once in four months, did anyone measure what her body was doing with any of these drugs. The only time her blood was ever analyzed was afterwards by the straight s by the state's crime lab as evidence. The analysis is now in front of a jury. A forensic toxicologist has told them the drug levels were below what is considered toxic. The jury heard that testimony. They heard the numbers. The jury heard the word toxic. So the jury draws the conclusion, what it's supposed to draw, that she was not drugged. She knew what she was doing. And I want to tell you what that testimony established. Nothing. It established nothing at all. There is no blood concentration at which human beings become homicidal. There's no threshold above which akathesia begins. And below, which it does not. There is no validated serum level for suicidal thinking. No laboratory on earth can run this because the numbers do not exist. What was presented in a courtroom as science was theater. It had the costume of science, a lab, a CV, a chain of custody, a decimal point. But it had no absolute substance at all, and it was meaningless. And here's what I'm going to argue over the course of this episode. And I want to state it plainly at the top so you know where I'm coming from. And this happens every day, folks. Lindsay Clancy told her doctors repeatedly and in writing that the drugs they were prescribing her were making her worse. Her husband said it out loud in an examination room in December. A specialist. At a hospital that she was admitted to, wrote it in a chart prior to any of this happening, before these children were brutally murdered. Everyone was told. Nobody stopped. And so this is not a case about whether one woman was insane. This is a case about what was foreseeable, who foresaw it and what they did next. Dr. Roger McFillin (05:17.454) But it's an indictment on a system. It's an indictment on a medical profession. Because you're gonna find out as I lay out this case today that they followed their standard of care. And that is this episode. So here's what happened on January 24th, 2023. That morning she made them breakfast. She took Cora to the pediatrician for a stomachache. She took all three. Into the backyard in the snow and they built a snowman. And she sent the photograph to Patrick and to her mother. Dawson had dressed himself for the first time that morning, and Patrick photographed him mid jump, grinning, arms over his head. Patrick was working downstairs in the basement. Around a quarter to five, they were texting about dinner. She asked about takeout. She looked at a map to see how long the trip would take. The prosecution says that was her measuring the window. The complaint says she did it because she did not want to be alone and needed to know when help was coming back. Patrick left for food and a stop at CVS for something for Cora. He was gone about twenty five minutes. In that window, she strangled all three children in the basement using exercise resistant bands. She then took a quantity of her own medication, cut her neck and her wrists, and she went out a second story window. A fall of roughly twenty feet. Patrick came home to a quiet house. The bedroom door was locked. When he got in, he saw blood in an open window. He ran outside, found his wife on the ground, and he called 911. It was only after police alive arrived that anyone went to the basement. And that's where Cor Cora and and Dawson died that day. Callan died three days later. Lindsay survived with a thoracic spinal cord injury. She's permanently paralyzed below the sternum. Dr. Roger McFillin (07:30.5) With fractures through her cervical and thoracic spine and multiple broken ribs. She has been held at Tewkesbury State Hospital since 2023. There are two theories, and a third one that I don't believe anyone is arguing. The Commonwealth's theory is simple. She was tired of motherhood. She wanted to die. She did not trust anyone else to raise her children. She planned it. Prosecutors told the jury. She was not in a state of psychosis, that she acted intentionally, rationally, swiftly to accomplish a very specific goal, as if she was a sociopath. They point to the snowman, the smiling photographs, the family outings that month, the map search, the 25-minute window, the mostly filled up. prescription pill bottles and the fact that she denied homicidal thoughts to every clinician who ever asked. That last one is real and it is the best thing they have, and I'm going to deal with it directly later in this episode. So I'm not going to walk past it. The defense theory is postpartum psychosis with command hallucinations and therefore no criminal responsibility. In Massachusetts, once the defense raises that, the burden shifts. The Commonwealth has to disprove it beyond a reasonable doubt. Now I'm not an attorney, but I question whether that is the best approach. Convict and it's a life without parole, find her not criminally responsible, and she goes to a state psychiatric facility. And there and then there's a third account, which I don't hear anybody arguing, and which is the reason I'm recording this, that the state she was in on March twenty fourth was not some psychiatric illness. Dr. Roger McFillin (09:38.007) It was iatrogenic harm over four months. Dr. Roger McFillin (09:43.682) And she was telling her prescribers. It was occurring right in front of the physicians. And they kept acting in a negligent way. Criminally neg negligent, in my opinion. So let me show you the record. I want to tell you where all this comes from. There are three separate bodies of material, and they're not all equal. The first is the criminal trial happening right now in Plymouth Superior Court. Swan Swan Sworn testimony under oath, subject to cross-examination. That is the highest tier of evidence in this episode. When I quote a prescriber or a clinician that was working with her, this is where it comes from, unless I tell you otherwise. The second is the civil complaint Lindsay Clancy filed in Norfolk Superior Court on January 22nd of this year against 11 defendants, including seven individual providers. That document is built from her medical records. It's dated, detailed, and specific. It is also a legal pleading drafted by her lawyer. It is her side. It's an allegation, not a finding. Her ex-husband, now ex-husband, Patrick, has filed a separate wrongful death suit, naming some of the same providers. The third is contempt. Evidence, phone records, text messages, her own journal, testimony from friends and family. I will tell you which one I'm drawing from as I go, where they disagree, and in one crucial place, they disagree enormously. I'll tell you that too. Two more things before I start. Every clinician I'm going to name is a defendant in active litigation. None of them have been found liable of anything. What I'm Doing in this episode is reading a documented record and telling you what I think it shows. Therefore, this is my opinion. It's an opinion I hold strongly and I believe I can support. It's certainly not a verdict. I'm not a court jury member. I'm not a judge. So I am not going to hand you a clean story because the story is not very clean. There is evidence in this record that cuts hard against. Dr. Roger McFillin (12:08.619) some things I'm about to argue. I'm going to put it in front of you near the end rather than hope you never find it. So let's let's start part one of this case. Who was she? And that matters. History always matters. Context always matters. Because this is important in making clinical decisions. There is certainly a difference For a clinician, when they gather a clinical history, and this person has a distinct history of suffering and deterioration and mental health-related issues, who hasn't been able to function, who has not had children before, who hasn't been an upstanding member of their community. So let me describe her, Lindsay Marie Clancy, born in August of 1990. And raised in Wallingford, Connecticut. She was a strong student, accelerated nursing program at Massachusetts General Hospital, and then nine years working there as a labor and delivery nurse. She delivered babies for a living. So she knows what postpartum depression looks like. She knew the screening tools by name. She knew what the drugs were called and what they were supposed to do. She was not a naive consumer of psychiatric care. She was inside the system professionally, which I believe puts her at a disadvantage from the beginning because there's an aspect of brainwashing into this system, which later I'll compare to maybe how a 13-year-old would look at this. She married Patrick Clancy in December of 2016. They settled in Ducksbury on the South Shore, about 35 miles from Boston. Three children: Cora Marie, born Christmas Eve, 2017. Dawson William, September of 2019. Callan Patrick, May of 2022. Every witness who has taken that stand has said a version of the same thing. The family's nanny told the journey, she was a the jury that she was a wonderful mother who loved her children. Her former father-in-law called her loving and caring. Friends, co-workers, a fitness center director. Dr. Roger McFillin (14:33.69) Patrick's own mother testified to a grand jury that she loved everything about her. Her sister described her as a person who writes handwritten notes and shows up when you need her. There's no history of violence, no history of abuse, no child protective service file. There's nothing. This is not a case where a monster was hiding in plain sight and just everyone missed it. Because nobody missed anything, because there was nothing to miss. This is the Fact, the prosecution has to explain, and I want you to notice how they explain it. Because they don't, they just skip it. They start their story in December. And here is the part almost nobody covering this case seems to want to touch, and it's the foundation of everything that follows. She had experienced postpartum mood struggles and anxiety previously. After Cora in 2017, some pregnancy anxiety over an abnormal ultrasound, reported, resolved, back to part-time work, breastfed for a year, uneventful. After Dawson in 2019, something different. Patrick described her as having manic behavior for several day days, which I will say up front is a problem. We should not use clinical determs to describe behaviors. This begins to bias the jury right there, and Patrick's not a doctor. He should just describe what he saw directly, not diagnose it. But this is what everyone tends to do now because we are so completely medicalized. In October of 2020, she went through a stretch of decluttering, obsessively cleaning, discarding things, simplifying her life. She said she felt amazingly, amazingly on top of things. There may have been a pressure to be more active. Let me ask you is this mental illness? Many people have gone through some sort of experience like this and clearly would say no. But now we look back through this biased lens, and people start labeling it differently. So with this, everything is in context, and to what degree? And what degree does it impair any functioning? Dr. Roger McFillin (17:02.202) Then about two months postpartum, the anxiety arrived. And a psychiatrist offered her Zoloft, of course, because that's what they do somehow, and for some reason, we live in a time where anxiety is something we should be scared of, apparently. Luckily, she declined. She was breastfeeding, and thank God she did not follow medical advice. And children may still be alive today if she continued to exercise that judgment in the future. What is tragic is that she didn't. And I want to want you to kind of hold this in your mind as I discuss the rest of the case, because what happened after she declined to Zoloft? Well, it resolved. No drugs. She came out the other side and went back to her life. Anxiety in itself is not dangerous. And if we view it as dangerous, it tends to intensify. And so she's already run this exact experiment once on herself. Callan was born in May of 2022. The pattern started again, a little bit bigger. According to the complaint, she began an extensive exercise program one week after delivery. Could be a concern, could be in response to what she went through previously. She woke up at four in the morning before her children. She ran three miles, not excessive. She did 30 minutes on a Peloton, 30 minutes of aerobics. Okay, I might be mildly concerned. On the 4th of July, five weeks postpartum, she ran a five-mile race. Her sister noticed she had uncharacteristically bought into a beach body multi-level marketing scheme and was posting workout videos, recruiting her friends. None of this indicates mania, though. And whatever you want to call it, it's certainly not depression. Then at roughly 12 weeks, it seemed to have flipped suddenly, but we don't know that. There is some anxiety, some low mood, insomnia, three hours of sleep a night, lower motivation, everything becomes a little bit more heavy. Getting dressed becomes more of a chore. And her parents drove in from out of state to help with the children. Now, I do not understand, we don't have any evidence of what might have prompted that. Dr. Roger McFillin (19:28.334) As a clinician, those things are key. Maybe it's challenges with her kids sleeping. Maybe there's some marital problems. Maybe she's just dealing with certain thoughts about who she is in her life. And safe care, that's what you begin to deal with. But that is the state we should know when she started looking for help in September of twenty twenty two. Definitely a concern. I'm not undermining that at all. But this is exactly where we have to investigate because it's the start of this, and then we fast forward to the crime. Everything from here is dated. The dates come from her medical records as laid out in the civil complaint, cross-checked against sworn testimony. I want you to notice one thing as I read this. Notice how many times she reported a bad response to their treatment. And then notice what happened next. So let's start September 12th. She searches online and finds Dr. Jennifer Tufts, a psychiatrist, had a practice in braintree. Advertising is specialty in women's mental health and perinatal psychiatry. She books the appointment herself. Nobody referred her. She went looking. This is an online search. Then September 15th, first appointment, and it's virtual. Her Edinburgh postnatal depression score at the time is 23. The screening threshold for probable depression is 13. She's at 23. Okay. Well, let me just of course that number should be meaningless to you. Because there are many things that require context and investigation. These are rather arbitrary cutoffs. But the doctor uses that screening measure and Dr. Tufts prescribes Zoloft. Lindsay hesitates because she is breastfeeding and she wants to try some therapy first. September thirtieth, she messages Tufts through the Dr. Roger McFillin (21:47.634) Patient portal about extending her maternity leave. In sworn testimony, the prosecutor read that message to the jury. She wrote that she did not feel mentally well enough to return to caring for patients, that having to stay up all night as a nurse was not possible right now. Well, of course. And that she was just beginning to feel well enough to function. Without any drugs. Read that again. She's telling her psychiatrist in writing that she's starting to stabilize without these drugs. Now, she also doesn't want to return to work, and she needs a doctor's approval. That's important. So she is taking a realistic assessment. I assume at the time. She's up throughout the night. She requires sleep. More sleep deprivation, the more likelihood you are going to make mistakes, especially in the medical field. It's not possible. Now, fast forward to early October, she sees Tufts again. The purpose of that appointment is to complete the paperwork for her maternity leave extension. That's what she's looking for. And after that appointment, mysteriously, she starts the Zolof. Now, I want to stop here because I've read this timeline more times than is probably healthy, because I'm focused on this part. I keep coming back to it. This is the first domino. And everything in this episode, the 13 drugs, the 400 milligrams of antipsychotics, the withdrawals, everything that we're going to get to, it all runs downstream from this appointment. And nobody has explained it. Look at what she had already told them. She was often offered the drug and said no. She was breastfeeding. She wanted to try therapy first. She had reason to be confident about that because two years earlier, after her second child, she had been offered Zooft and declied for the same reason and it resolved. It's not like she didn't do anything. She focused on exercise, diet, meditation, probably solving some problems, a few sessions in therapy. She had already run the experiment on herself. Dr. Roger McFillin (24:16.985) And then no drug arm worked. Again, if you're thinking scientifically, which psychiatrists rar rarely, if ever, do. And on September thirtieth, two weeks after refusing, she wrote to her psychiatrist and said in her own words that she was beginning to feel well enough. Not that she was well. She was just telling her doctor she could not go back to becoming a labor and delivery nurse and stay up all night with patients. That's why she needed to leave. But she was telling her in writing that she was moving in the right direction without any prescription. So what happened in that first week of October? Nothing clinical as far as the record shows. There's no crisis. There's no deterioration entered anywhere. There's no note saying she got worse and reconsidered. There's one event. She went in to get her leave paperwork signed. Because this is the point in the episode where I couldn't I can say something that I might not be able to support, but I'm going to anyway because I've worked in this field. Nothing in this record says that anyone made the medication a condition of the paperwork. I don't have any evidence of that. I'm not alleging it. I want to be clear. But many people know what I am insinuating here because I have experienced it myself working in this field. The person recommending the drug and the person certifying her fitness to be out of work are the same person. She needed that signature. She was a nurse with three children under five, one of them a four-month-old. And she just could not go back to a hospital floor. And a psychiatric leave certification is not just a diagnosis, it generally rests on a diagnosis and treatment plan. Dr. Roger McFillin (26:15.653) Right. How does the psychiatrist justify this recommendation without treating that individual? And what this usually means is the patient is too unwell to work, but is declining the recommended treatment. And that psychiatrist is then in an awkward position that everyone in medicine recognizes. And nobody's saying this out loud. You cannot be sick enough to need the leave and well enough to refuse the pill. This is how they think. This is why they are dangerous. I'm not telling you anyone in that room intended that pressure. I'm telling you the pressure exists in the system. Whether or not anyone intends it. And it exists for every person in this country who's ever needed a form signed by the same clinician who wants them medicated. She said in no in September. She said she was approving without it. She started the first week of October after she got that paperwork signed. These are the facts in the order they occurred. And I have not seen anyone put them next to each other and move in this direction. Dr. Roger McFillin (27:27.771) So let's take a look at this. It's entirely possible she simply reconsidered that she looked at where she was, decided therapy alone was not going to be enough, and made a reasonable decision that many other people would also make in her position. It's a fair account, I cannot rule it out. But those scores that she takes on these screening measures. as I mentioned before, are meaningless without any further information. Right? The sleep could be sleep deprivation could be completely unrelated to any mental illness. She's got five kids under five. Her husband's working. But if she really was deteriorating, that should be in her chart. A patient who twice declines a medication and then starts it is it's a clinically significant reversal and the reason for why it belongs in the record. Like, what is the difference from a couple weeks ago? And if it's there, I've not seen it. And it's not discussed in the trial. And if I was a defense attorney, I would be hammering these details. Because 10 days later, on 50 milligrams of Zoloft, she did not sleep for 48 hours straight. 48 hours without sleep after starting a dose of an SSRI. Folks, they have a name for this, and it's called activation syndrome. In any other field of medicine, that is a serious adverse drug reaction. And the question that follows is this: Why did the person react this way? And what does it tell us about her? October 20th, she reports all of it. Dr. Roger McFillin (29:33.925) The response is to stop the Zoloft and prescribe Atavan and Beta drill for sleep. This, to me, is insane. I mean criminally stupid and dangerous. You do not abruptly stop an SSRI, that the dose, which was recently doubled, then you don't add another drug on, in my opinion. So the prescribing clinician assumes it was the SSRI, but then abruptly stops it. and starts another drug. October twenty first, Adavan is started. Dr. Roger McFillin (30:18.49) In trial testimony, doctor Tufts described it as the lowest dose. That shouldn't matter. October 26th, follow-up. She reports the Adavan is helping the anxiety. Makes sense. It's a benzodiazepine. We also know that after a short amount of time, dependency ensues. She's also taking Benadryl at night. And now, after abruptly stopping an SSRI, she adds Adavan, Benadryl, and recommends another drug, Boosbar. So count where we are. Six weeks in, Zolov started and stopped after a severe reaction, Atavan added, Benadryl added, a fourth drug proposed. Two things to get this right before we move forward. SSRI, adverse reactions, can be immediate, real, and dangerous. And psychiatrists sometimes use benzodiazepines to treat. Akathesia withdrawal reactions. But it does not appear that is what is occurring here. So you can't argue that Adavan, in its sense, was pharmacologically wrong. The argument is that it was given without anyone ever naming what it was treating, and the name is what determined everything else downstream. So let's go back to October 20th. She reports all of it: 48 hours without sleep, the racing thoughts, the worsening anxiety. She says she feels awful. The response is to stop the Zoloft and the prescribed Atavan and Benadrol, right? So the Atavan started. Now I want you to count what just happened inside about 24 hours. One drug removed, true drugs were added, three changes one day. And this is what I've been arguing for my career. This is insane and it's dangerous, and it's a window where some of the most Dr. Roger McFillin (32:21.97) Horrific adverse reactions occur, severe akathisia, suicide, violent behavior. It's in this window of severe psychiatric drug withdrawal and increasing new drugs or adding new drugs. Okay. And we know not every human being is the same, that there are different genetic factors that influence how someone metabolizes a drug. You would think a psychiatrist knows this. And this is where you investigate. This is where you know you act like a real physician, which you do some testing to determine certain profiles. You monitor the people like this. You coordinate care. And I want you to mark this date because this is where the entire case becomes like unreadable. No one in this story can tell you what is causing anything. And so let me take you through this in order. So first you have the removal. So Zoloft was stopped abruptly. It's not tapered. It's just abruptly stopped. Just stop taking it. And Zoloft has a Zoloft has a half-life of about 26 hours. So when you take it away, when you remove it, the level in the blood falls over a few days, and the brain that had been adjusting to its presence is left without it. The published discontinuation literature mostly describes people who've been on these drugs for four to six weeks or more. And she had been on it two to three. This should not matter to you, the doctor, or the jury. What happens to some people in four weeks can happen to others in two or three. Everyone is different, or even less. But look at typical withdrawal reactions: insomnia, anxiety, agitation, irritability, vivid dreams, dizziness, emotional volatility, brain zaps, and look. At when it arrives, typically two to four days after stopping, peaking through the first week. She stopped around October 20th, which puts the peak window bit somewhere between the 22nd and the 27th. On October 26th, she's reported that the anxiety was better, but the sleep was not. Which brings me to the thing that actually matters, the second edition. Why the benzodiazepine was the wrong answer to this question. Dr. Roger McFillin (34:45.543) Bentodiazepines are often used to assist with with red with withdrawal. it's in the literature, and if you believe a woman is in a state of drug-induced agitation, akathisia, it's not a crazy thing to do to recommend that drug. People can defend it. Drugs like this can be used in the short term to ease suffering. So I'm not going to pass judgment of that. My problem is that's not what was written down. Because when you give a benzodiazepine for an adverse drug reaction, this now becomes part of the record. And it can inform future prescribing. Or if a doctor reads the full record, they can come to the conclusion that this person had an adverse reaction to an SSRI. Dr. Roger McFillin (35:41.637) So this is important. You do not give this woman another drug that acts on the serotonin system. You just don't, right? Bad reaction. I mean these drugs are not very helpful anyway. We don't have any evidence that there's any clinical response. So why take the risk? This is always about managing the risk profile. So she started on Ada van because she has anxiety. That's the reason. Same appointment, same prescription, same patient. And two completely different futures because in the first version, she never gets a later SSRI. In the second version, the one that actually happened, a nurse practitioner opens a chart on November twenty first. She sees a woman with anxiety and insomnia and then prescribes Prozac. Another SSRI. Now. Again, this is the first major step here in medical negligence and harm, because there's the history here. So four days later, the insomnia intensifies and it's stopped abruptly again. Okay. This is after November twenty first, where she's prescribed another SSRI, fluxetine, otherwise known as Prozac. In every other field of medicine. This is the thing you are trained specifically to never do. You do not re-expose a patient to a drug class that has already injured them. The whole point of documenting an adverse reaction is to prevent exactly that. But this happened because the reaction was not documented as it. It was documented as a symptom. And this happens all the time with these psychiatric physicians and nurse practitioners. They see drug. Dr. Roger McFillin (37:39.494) Adverse reactions and withdrawal symptoms as emerging symptoms of an underlying mental illness. The first prescriber converted an adverse drug reaction into a psychiatric diagnosis. It took the single most useful piece of clinical information anyone would ever have about this woman and wrote it down as anxiety. There is a third thing, and this is the one Dr. Tufts herself flagged. On November 2nd, 11 days after starting it, she discusses tapering the Ada van because it was only ever meant to be short term and it causes dependence. Excellent. This is correct. This is good clinical practice. I have no criticism of it at all. Most people don't even get that. So this is rare. But 11 days is enough for her to already have become dependent on the drug. So the response to a drug reaction has now generated a potential second drug reaction. And that drug is being removed. And the removal of that drug can produce withdrawal symptoms, anxiety, insomnia, agitation that are indistinguishable from the symptoms that she originally came up in with. And when those symptoms appear, what is the natural conclusion? her anxiety is back and she needs treatment. That's how they look at this. Some underlying brain disorder. So They've built this machine that manufactures evidence for its own necessity. Third, and this is important, why every subsequent addition can make this worse. Here's the principle, and it's not just psychiatric, it's just how you find out anything about anything. It's common sense, science, rational decision-making, which you rarely see in this field. And this never happened for her. You should change one variable at a time. If you change two, You cannot attribute the result to either. If you change three, you have not run an experiment. You've made a mess. October 20th and 21st, go back. Three changes in 24 hours. A drug removed, two drugs added. And now watch what that costs. October 26th, still not sleeping. The original activation, still resolving. Zoloff discontinuation, abruptly stopping that drug. Dr. Roger McFillin (40:06.516) You're adding Benadryl, which can fragment sleep and cause daytime grogginess. And in some people, paradoxical excitation. Nobody can distinguish between them. Because the information required to distinguish between them was not documented. And by design, you're doing multiple things at once. So what do you do when you cannot tell what is causing the problem? Again, this is bad medicine, bad science. You're not even implementing basic common sense. But inside the psychiatric training, what do they do? They add another drug. Boost bar is recommended on the 26th. Trazodone on November 16th. Prozac on the 21st. On November 25th, Ambien, Remron, and Clonopin, three in a single day. I'm not making this up. Every one of those additions did the same thing the first one did. It removed a variable. From your control and added a candidate that could cause any of those symptoms on the list. We are now in an absolute mess. Drugs being added, drugs bring stopped, increased in in dosage. In my opinion, they were drugging this woman into oblivion and calling it health care. There is absolutely no positive outcome. That can come from this type of treatment. Only tragedy, and I see tragedy as as somebody just being treated with an episodic condition and it turning into long-term mental illness. How many people are out there who Have been provided these drugs, worsened, and it's being named a mental illness. And they believe they are just chronically ill. There's so many. By late November, this poor woman is on ambion, Remron, used as an antipsychotic, clonopin, another benzodiazepine. All this started on the same day, on top of a taper that she had not finished, and four days coming off her second SSRI. Dr. Roger McFillin (42:25.992) The next day she cannot even tell what is real. Would you? Would you think about it? This amount of mind and mood altering drugs being treated in this w manner. On November 16th, she takes herself to the emergency room at South Shore Hospital, complaining of insomnia, anxiety, and heart palpitations. What does the IRER do? Well, they prescribe another drug, tries it on. The drug Number is now five. More drugs for the symptoms for the side effects of other drugs, more drugs to mask withdrawal. November 20th, Patrick's mother, who is herself a nurse at South Shore, calls the perinatal behavioral health program to try to get her more help. A nurse practitioner, Julie Paul, reaches out. November 21st, Lindsay tells Nurse Paul she's very frustrated and scared. She has extreme insomnia, averaging three hours a night, and now she is experiencing racing thoughts. Racing thoughts reported to a perinatal specialist on the record. What does Nurse Paul do? Prescribes Prozac. Dr. Roger McFillin (43:54.429) SSRI. So November twenty fifth, after four days on Prozac, Lindsay reports the insomnia has intensified. Prozac is abruptly discontinued. Two antipress antidepressants producing activation and worsening insomnia. Should that be enough? I ask you. On the record, we're only in the November. Started this process in September. And the same day, according to the complaint, three new drugs are prescribed at once. That's the Ambien, the Rembron, and the Clonopin, after abruptly stopping the Prozac. Three in one day. November 26th, after taking the Remron, she experiences disassociation. The complaint describes it in detail. The world around her looked unreal, distorted, and distant. She could not determine what was real. She became disoriented, forgetful, confused, disconnected from her body. She could not drive and she could not be alone. Read the pharmacology section on the label for that class of drug, and you will find it there. She reported it immediately. On November twenty eighth, she reports these symptoms to her provider, still sleeping three to four hours, disoriented and forgetful. November twenty ninth, she begins with a new prescriber, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, Rebecca Gelato at South Shore. Gelata evaluating her on all these drugs and deteriorating inexplicably describes her as having bipolar disorder. Dr. Roger McFillin (45:40.735) Can't even begin to tell you how many times I have witnessed this. And I get on the phone, usually angry, usually accusatory, and I say, Sir, ma'am, you're seeing an obs a drug reaction. Don't describe the symptoms of these drug reactions and discontinuation as another mental illness. But this is exactly what this doctor does. And prescribes Seraquil. They literally have no idea what they are doing. We're into December now, and this is the month where everything collapses. After starting Saraquil, according to the complaint, her condition takes a dramatic turn for the worse. She develops suicidal ideations, known adverse reaction. She begins experiencing what she and everyone around her calls intrusive thoughts, another Adverse reaction noted. Dr. Roger McFillin (46:44.232) The complaint says those intrusive thoughts were auditory hallucinations, and they provide the content. A voice telling her she will not be the same. She wants to die. She tells her husband, her parents, her providers, that she feels emotionless, like a zombie, and she attributes it to the Cerequel. Of course, that's what Cerequel is for. It will turn you into a zombie. That's the drug effect. December 2nd, she reports to Julata that she has lost 15 pounds, no appetite, pan attack, panic attacks, confusion, loss of a of ability to focus all over the previous four days. 15 pounds in a month, and that's a physical sign of her deterioration. And this is measurable. This is not some abstract emotion. This is a physical measurement. December fourth, she is frightened enough by the hallucinations that she calls a suicide hotline. But she's told that there's no emergency because she has no specific plan. My goodness. She's trying to prevent that outcome. That's why she's calling you in the first place. She's looking for help. December 5th, she meets virtually with a crisis clinician. Again, told that she does not meet criteria for inpatient treatment because she has no plan. Well, why does that have to be the only outcome? Why can't she be seen by a competent clinician? Why can't she be supported, helped? Why is the only outcome whether you're locked up in a cell or not? Two crisis contacts in two days. Both screened her out on a checklist with something galactically stupid, like, you don't have a plan. Yeah, well just wait then till you have a plan. Dr. Roger McFillin (48:33.173) Incompetence. January or December 6th, Patrick attends the appointment with this nurse practitioner, Gelato. I want to read to you what the complaint says he said, because if you believe one line in this entire episode, make it this one. Patrick told the nurse practitioner that Lindsay was 10,000 times worse since she had taken the medication. And I use that term, medication, loosely. He asked whether they could. Get her off the drugs and start from scratch to see what was actually going on. He asked whether there could have been a mistake, whether the wrong drugs had been used. And the complaints that she acknowledged that it was possible. Again, she acknowledged it was possible. And then, according to the complaint, what did she do? She increased the seroquil toward four hundred milligrams a day. What? Four hundred milligrams of cerequel after rapidly deteriorating, you're giving him more of the poison. Dr. Roger McFillin (49:43.51) For ins insomnia and anxiety and a breastfeeding postpartum woman. This is our health care. A woman who already reported that the drug was making her feel emotionless and like a zombie, who had a hard time being able to determine what was real. And she's taking care of children. And her husband said in that room out loud that the drugs were making her 10,000 times worse. December thirteenth, deeply depressed, no motivation, still suicidal. She wants all this to be over. Patrick calls the office on December 15th. He reports Lindsay has had a devastating week and that this was the worst day. The complaint says the hallucinations were loud and continuous all day long, telling her she will never be herself again, that she's damaged, that the only option is to die. If you've worked in the mental health field, And you've worked in this era of mass prescribing of psychiatric drugs. You clearly see this occur in someone where it was not previously there at no point in their entire lives. And the insanity of this is these clinicians don't in any way trace it back to the drugs that they run, because they're so thoroughly brainwashed. And around this period, she tells Patrick she's having thoughts of harming the children. And she tells her mother as well. And this is where it's tragic. According to the complaint, she's also having paranoid delusions that people can hear her thoughts, that she would be locked up and have her children taken away. And this explains a great deal about what she did. Dr. Roger McFillin (51:30.357) Tragic. December 16th, she sees that original psychiatrist, Dr. Tufts. She reports she's on Volume and Ciroquil that were prescribed to help her sleep. She reports suicidal ideation. She's been to an emergency room at Mass General and then declined admission. Note that Gelato had added the volume to help taper the other benzodiazepines. She's now has two of them in play. Plus an antipsychotic drug climbing towards 400 milligrams. Tufts, according to trial testimony, advises her to have one person managing her medication. Lindsay says she keeps reaching out to different people and receiving all different types of plans. December 20th, Mass General Emergency Room again. December 21st, she admits herself to the partial hospitalization program at Women and Infants Hospital in Providence. Her chief complaint is recorded. She says she feels numb and crazy depressed. She cannot feel love. She cannot feel fear. Her life is becoming a disaster. That she's messed up beyond repair. That it all takes, that it takes all the effort in the world just to breathe. So she is at the end. And here's the extraordinary part. And this is the part that should be the leading news story in the country. And you don't see it. The clinical team at women. Women and infants concluded that her symptoms were more pharmacologically induced than purely depressive. They accepted that she was over medicated and they recommended weaning her off the serquil and they determined that their own postpartum program was not appropriate for her because the problem was not postpartum depression, the problem was the drugs. A specialist perinatal team member looked at this woman in December of twenty twenty two and said in writing that this looks like a drug effect. Then they reached out to her prescriber to discuss her care, and according to the complaint, the call was not returned. And this is the whole system in one answered unanswered phone call. This has been my experience in the system, almost been impossible to get in touch with these drug dealers. Dr. Roger McFillin (53:47.56) Late December, following the seroquil reduction, her suicidal ideation resurges. Understand what has just happened pharmacologically. She's been climbing towards 400 milligrams of an antipsychotic. It's then reduced on the recommendation of a hospital that will not treat her with no coordinated plan and no receiving clinician. December 29th, she tells Patrick she cannot tough this out anymore, needs to go to McLean. December thirtieth, Mass back to the Mass General Emergency Room. Now, McLean Hospital is highly regarded as one of the top psychiatric hospitals in the world because it's affiliated with Harvard. That's not my assessment because you're talking about some of the most embedded e experts in the most harmful of systems. December thirty first, she emits herself to McLean Hospital in Belmont. So she's gets in there. And she is on a locked unit with 15 minute suicide checks. And just for context, this is worse than jail. In jail, the inmates get an hour outside and get to see the sun. So imagine struggling sleeping and having someone check on you every 15 minutes and you have no exposure to sun. This is a it's a separate form of torture that happens every day. Her admitting symptoms are documented as passive suicidal ideation. Detachment, hopelessness, no appetite, no energy for activities of daily living, no motivation, anedonia, racing thoughts, inability to organize her thoughts, memory problems, anxiety, and insomnia. Her insight and judgment are documented as limited. According to the complaint, she does not see a physician until January 3rd, three days after the admission. She was admitted on New Year's Eve into a holiday skeleton crew. The complaint describes patients doing Puzzles and coloring and nurses behind glass. Yes, this is a psychiatric hospital unit. January 3rd, she finally sees a physician. The instruction is to stop the seroquil and stop the benzodiazepines. Bang. Just stop them. Another drug is prescribed, trazodone for sleep. Stop the antipsychotic, stop the benzodiazepines all at once. Abrupt stop. Start something new. You see the pattern? Dr. Roger McFillin (56:14.196) All I want to say, and say it clearly here is what it means to stop one of these drugs and start another one on the same breath, because it happens constantly. Nobody talks about this risk. When you take a psychiatric drug away, the brain does not simply return to how it was. It has spent weeks adapting to the drug's presence, changing receptor numbers, changing receptor sensitivity, shifting its own chemistry to push back against a chemical that you are introducing. Remove the drug, and every one of those adaptations is suddenly unopposed. And the person goes into a state, not an illness, a withdrawal state with its own timeline, its own symptoms, its own beginning and end. Now start a new drug on top of that the same day. And you have done something genuinely reckless because from that move that moment forward, nobody can tell you what they are looking at again. Is this Withdraw? Is this the drug? Who knows? And here's what makes it worse. Dr. Roger McFillin (57:27.018) Because I mean, from their perspective, from the disease model. Deterioration is always the mental illness. So this withdrawal always gets read as relapse. And this gets in their notes, their clinical document documentation gets traveled to the next prescriber. And of course, if the prescriber is not understanding it to be a drug reaction, then they're susceptible to making this same mistake. On November 24th, this woman came off her second antidepressant four days and was prescribed three new drugs the same day on top of a benzodiazepine taper that she was still running, four simultaneous neurochemical events in a single afternoon. The next day she could not tell was real, and there's no longer a person alive who could tell you. What the heck was going on? But I bet just from pure standpoint of using logic and reason, that if you were never trained to be a psychiatrist, you would look at the drugs to be a problem. Fast forward, all right. We're at January 4th now. She asked to go home for her daughter's birthday. It's Cora's birthday. Because she's saying that her thoughts have improved since the Ceroquil decrease. Does that mean they have improved? We don't know. She might just want to get home for her daughter's birthday. She's discharged on January 5th, five days total. She goes home with a two-week supply of Atavan and Trazodone per trial testimony. At trial, the treating hospital psychiatrist testified that her discharge diagnosis, not that this matters, it's all made up, was major depressive disorder severe without psychotic features. Dr. Roger McFillin (59:16.894) That she saw no signs of psychosis and she had no concerns about safety or risk to anyone else. On cross-examination, she asked how many women with postpartum psychosis she had treated in her career. She paused and said she had not seen any. After discharge, the complaint says she called Lindsay and spoke for 10 minutes, offering the names of antidepressants. McLean's staff suggested amitryptyline. A tricyclic. These are some of these old antidepressants that were prescribed before SSRIs. But it's another one and it certainly acts upon the serotonergic system. For a woman who has had two serious adverse reactions to two previous drugs acting on the serotonergic system, this is absolute insanity to consider a different one. The complaint says that after this hospitalization, Lindsay thought. She had just been in the best hospital in the country and there was no longer any hope. So she decided she must appear like she was okay and do her best. Remember that when you get to this, remember what she told clinicians afterwards. Because I think complexity here is doing work that it should not be doing. I want us to retreat to some form of common sense. If I would walk into a middle school right now and put this on a board. And just inform the 13-year-olds that she was given a drug that acts on a neurochemical called serotonin. Okay. Just introduce this to 13 year olds. And then I said to these 13 year olds that after this initial one, she had a severe reaction, 48 hours without sleep. So they gave her a different drug down the line. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:01:24.449) That again acts on serotonin. And she had a reaction to that one too in four days. And later she gave them a third one. And I would ask the 13-year-olds, what do they believe is going on? If a child could raise their hand and say, I think it may be the drug that is acting on that particular neurochemical. That may be producing symptoms. If a child can understand it, why wouldn't a doctor? Why wouldn't a jury? So it has to be presented that way. You see, folks, I'm trying to make a case for the defense attorney. Now, the reflex here is to say, these doctors just they must be low IQ sociopaths and There certainly are those, so don't get me wrong, but that's not been my experience. Most people, I believe, are doing the best that they can, or the best that they know they can, and they care. They actually have been brainwashed into believing that this is the best evidence-based care that exists. But, you know, my opinion is this kind of makes it worse, not better, because a thirteen year old sees it clearly for only one reason. Nobody has taught them yet to think about this otherwise. They have not been trained in the framework where deterioration is always the illness and improvement is always the drug. They have not learned the move where an adverse reaction becomes evidence of a hitting condition. As insane as that sounds. They do not yet know the vocabulary that lets you write down poor insight when a patient tells you a pill is hurting her. They have not been exposed to the brainwashing. The training is not. The training does not let you see the problem. The training is what stops you from seeing the problem. You do not require a medical degree to see what happened to Lindsay Clancy. In fact, you need to not have one. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:03:37.314) January 6th, she sees Tufts one day after the discharge, 17 minutes for the complaint. Tufts records the diagnosis of major depressive disorder, single episode, moderate, chronic. She records that the psychiatric condition is deteriorating and the and the medication is not effective. Deteriorating, written down, 18 days out. And January 7th is Cora's birthday party. She smiles, but cannot really converse with anyone. She avoids talking. She can't make sense of what other people are saying to her. Within one week of discharge, the complaint says the hallucinations resume. January 10th, back to Tufts. She has switched to volume for a benzodiazepine taper. Tufts notes that at some point they will add an antidepressant. Wow. January 16th, still debilitating depression. She has to force herself to do anything. She feels like a zombie. According to the complaint, the hallucination content is now explicit. That she could harm the children, she could kill herself, that she will never be the same, and the only option is to die. So what does Tuff do? This doctor prescribes the tricyclic antidepressant, amitryptyline, at ten milligrams a day. January twentieth, Lindsay research is what it researches through a Google search what a psychopath is, to find out if she is one and whether there's a cure. This is not a woman building a defense. This is a woman terrified of her own mind trying to diagnose herself and figure out what is going on because she is obediently following the experts and getting much worse. It must be her, she believes, because she is the psychopath and not the doctors in the system. January 23rd, a woman attending a 17-minute appointment. She reports being more anxious, heart racing, more mourning anxiety. Tuff records that her mood is the same, flat and anxious, that she has no motivation and is numb, not acknowledging that the drugs she is prescribing will do just that. They will strip her of motivation and make her numb. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:05:55.853) She reports that she has to force herself up and out of the house. Sleep is recorded as poor. Medication efficacy is recorded as poor. Insight is recorded as poor. The overall psychiatric condition is recorded as unchanged. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:06:11.852) The amitriptylene goes from ten milligrams to twenty. So nothing's working, and the dose is increased. That night she does not sleep. January twenty fourth, children are killed. Let me put the whole list in one place. Thirteen distinct psychiatric drugs, roughly four months. The Boston Globe reviewed court records and countered more than 30 separate prescriptions issued between September of 2022 and January of 2023, including repeat prescriptions for Valium, Serquil, and Atavan at different doses. Then there's the antidepressants. Zolof started mid-October, stopped after severe activation reaction. Prozac started November 21st, stopped after four days for worsening insomnia. Remron started November 25th, producing disassociation within a day. Trazodone prescribed in an emergency room in November and again at McLean. Amitryptaline, a tricyclic, started January 16th, doubled January 23rd. An I Psychotic seroquil started late November, moving towards 400 milligrams a day, tapered late December, stopped entirely at McLean in early January. Benzodiazepines, Lorazepam, Atavan, started October 21st, tapered, restarted, then discharged from McLean. Clonazepan, Clonopin, prescribed October twenty fifth. Diazepam, Valium. added December to taper the others, then itself tapered in January. The sleep and sedating agents. Ambient prescribed November twenty third, twenty-fifth. Benadryl used nightly from October. And then the others, Boose Par prescribed but never started. Lamictal appearing in the record via civ civil filings. That is thirteen. and I have to update that number because in this trial under oath a brigham and Dr. Roger McFillin (01:08:25.718) Women's psychiatrists confirmed two more that I have not seen reported anywhere. We'd have to look into this. Well, butrin and hydroxazine. Like they're throwing everything at this woman. I'm going to keep saying 13 in this episode because 13 is the number I can source to the prescription records, but understand that the real figure is at least 13. And on the sworn testimony in this trial, it's probably 15. The prescribers, a private psychiatrist, two nurse practitioners, emergency department physicians at South Shore. Emergency department physicians at Mass General, a physician at Women and Infants, an inpatient team at McLean, a therapist, her civil suit names eleven defendants, including seven individual prescribers, seven prescribers, at least 13 drugs, four months, one woman. And when a specialist team finally said out loud that looks like a drug effect and picked up the phone to say so, nobody answered, no one returned the call. Now the Commonwealth has to answer to that. Their point is And this is what they're saying is that she was never on all of them at once, that some of these prescriptions were barely touched. Two pills from one bottle, zero from the next, and that in the weeks right before January 24th, she was prescribed just three things: trizodone volume, ametryptaline. But look at what that argument actually concedes. The reason the list is short in January is that everything else had already been started and stopped. Zoloff started and stopped. Prozac started and stopped. Ramrin started and stopped. Clonopin, Ambien, Serquil. You've heard it all. Three drugs at the end is not evidence that she was lightly medicated. It's the wreckage of nine that failed. And the three that were left were the three that matter. An antidepressant she had been put on that was double the day before. Benzodiazepine, she was actively tapering. Sedative. In a nervous system, three weeks off in antipsychotic. The Commonwealth is telling you there were only three. I'm telling you it is the fourth and the fifth and the ninth, the ones that were taken away that describe the state that she was in. And I want to close this section with two things from the record. I do not believe have been said out loud anywhere. The first, the civil complaint alleges that the standard of care some required someone to rudder. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:10:49.046) Blood plasma levels and to determine whether Lindsay was a slow metabolizer, given that she was having severe adverse reactions to a relatively low dose. No such testing was ever done, not once, not by seven prescribers over four months. And they call themselves physicians or healthcare providers, as any other. They never checked whether her body could actually process what they were putting into it. I mean, we treat farmed animals better than this. Here's the second one. Look at what converges the night of January 23rd into the morning of the 24th. She has been off Cerequel for about three weeks after climbing towards 400 milligrams a day a day. This is antipsychotic withdrawal. She's in the middle of an an active benzodiazepine taper. She's on volume after months of being on and off out of an andquanopen. That's benzodiazepine withdrawal. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:11:47.735) And on January twenty-third, her dose of a tricyclic antidepressant is doubled. Three simultaneous neurochemical events, all landing on the same 24 hour period in a woman who has not slept properly in five months. That night she didn't sleep at all. The next afternoon, three children died. Nobody in that courtroom is gonna say this out loud. The prosecution will not say it because it destroys premeditation. The defense is not saying it because they have committed to a disease they have to prove existed invisibly. Now there is an argument by the state that there was no lethal dose of any compound. This argument is insanely ignorant, and the defense should have a field day with this. We're not talking about lethal doses of something like alcohol or heroin. We're discussing a mind-and-mood altering chemical that is proven to create an adverse reaction upon first dose. Their supposed therapeutic dose can be lethal for some. And these cases have already been litigated. And the toxic ranges cited in the courtrooms come from a specific place. They are back calculated from fatal overdose case series, from dead bodies. They tell you what concentration was present in people who died from the drug. But they tell you nothing about behavior. No reference range has ever been established for akathesia, for example. None for emotional blunting or disinhibit. This inhibition or any other emergence of intrusive violent imagery, none for command hallucinations, and none for a withdrawal state, which is the state where the drug level is falling, not rising, where a blood test tells you the least of all. So when a toxicologist tells a jury the levels were not toxic, the honest translation is this she was not dying of an overdose. That's it. That's the whole Content of the statement. And there is the pharmacology of the individual, which the number erases completely. Blood concentration is not the effect on the brain. Plasma level is not receptor occupancy. Two people on the identical dose of the identical drug can differ by an order of magnitude and exposure on the basis of liver enzyme genotype alone. Roughly 7 to 10% of people. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:14:09.857) Of European descent carry two non-functional copies of the CYP2D6 enzyme. They are poor metabolizers. They accumulate. Others are ultra-rapid metabolizers and clear the drug so fast they live in a permanent state of partial withdrawal between doses. Amitryptaline, the drug that was doubled the day before, runs through CYP2D6 and CYP2C19. Sarah Quill runs primarily through CYP3A4. Her exposure to both is entirely unknown. Not unknowable, unknown, because nobody ever looked. And this is not my speculation. This is in her own complaint as an allegation of negligence. The standard of care required testing to determine why a woman was having severe adverse reactions at a relatively low dose and whether or not she was a slow metabolizer. It was never done. Now think about what that means for the courtroom. The Commonwealth toxicologist is comparing her blood values to population references, ranges built on other people's bodies, in order to tell a jury what was happening inside a nervous system that nobody ever considered to can think about. He is answering a question about her using data that is not about her. Again, that makes no sense. And notice the loop that closes there. The absence of testing during this period is now being used as evidence against her. There is a second thing. That we have to look at and we have to understand. She was not on a stable regimen. She was in the middle of two withdrawals and one escalation. A blood level taking at a single moment tells you what is present. It cannot tell you what has been removed or how fast or what the brain had already adapted to. Withdrawal is defined by absence. You cannot measure an absence with a concentration. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:16:16.163) There's no toxicologist alive who can tell you what the combination does to a sleep-deprived postpartum brain because it's never been studied in a con single controlled trial. It's never been studied because it cannot be studied. The permutations are effectively infinite, and no institutional review board on earth would approve it. But we run these experiments anyway. We just don't call them experiments. We call them psychiatric care. Now the part of the case that has been almost entirely ignored. The record is not a story. Of a woman who is re receiving, in my opinion, standard care. Because in the literature, it is very clear about what can happen through these dose additions and abruptly stopping drugs. Every one of these transitions is a neurochemical event. And the lazy here, the lazy version here says, well. This is rare. She got really bad care. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:17:22.775) It's unfortunate. And here's what I want to reflect on. Even though we have aspects of of this in the literature, even though I, not a prescribing physician, but rather a clinical psychologist who has access to the same information. I can tell you how dangerous this care is. But for the average psychiatrist, they are following protocols. Protocols that have existed for decades because they were trained that these drugs, when started at certain dose or in short periods of time, cannot in any way lead to severe withdrawal reactions. In fact, they're told these are medicines. They're told that these medicines are. Treating an underlying illness and any of the adverse reactions are so significantly rare. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:18:27.524) Many of these doctors are not aware of the literature on these specific genes that impact metabolism. According to the complaint, the clinical team concluded on December 21st, women and infants that her symptoms were more pharma pharmacologically induced than any psychiatric condition. They accepted she was over medicated. They recommended she start weaning off the seroquil. They determined that this is not postpartum depression. Her program was not a Appropriate. They reached out to the prescriber. The call was not returned. Everything else in this episode, some psychiatrist can argue about, but that one you can't. Failing to close the loop with a coordinating hospital that has flagged a suspected drug reaction in a high risk patient is not a judgment call. It's not a difference in opinion or a challenge of, you know, what these drugs are and what they're not. There is no school of psychiatry in which that is acceptable. So simply, and let me put it into words a lay person would understand, they concluded that she was being poisoned, and then the next step was she was provided more poison. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:19:52.495) December sixth, Patrick was in the room. He said ten thousand times worse. Could you please get her off the drugs? The complaint says this was acknowledged. They continued to increase her ser her ceracol anyway. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:20:10.276) The standard is not that a clinician prescriber must agree with a family member. The standard is that a documented plausible adverse drug reaction raised by a patient, corroborated by a spouse, and conceded as a possibility by a prescriber generates a differential. A moment where you ask whether the treatment is a problem. That moment does not appear anywhere in this record. Three new drugs in one day on top of an unfinished taper. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:20:43.154) Ugh. It's hard. It's hard to have episodes like this because I've been fighting against this on some level my entire career. There is so much about this case that we have to learn because this is psychiatric care. And it's becoming more and more normal because we've medicalized more and more of our human experience where we've induced fear. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:21:23.5) Everything I've told you so far comes from two places. Her own lawyer's complaint, which is an allegation, and testimony from clinicians who are being sued. So now I want you, I want to bring in someone else. The trial heard from a psychiatrist at Brigham and Women's Hospital. She's the associate chief of the Division of Psychiatry and Medicine there, and she runs the consultation liaison service, 19 years at the institution. Now let me explain what a consultation. liaison psychiatrist is. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:21:57.275) It's a subspecialty that works at the scene between psychiatry and the rest of medicine. You are the person other doctors call when a patient on their ward has something going on that they cannot fully understand. She met she met Lindsay Clancy on January 29th, 2023, five days after her children died. Clancy had just had her spine decompressed and fused. She was paralyzed. She had come off a ventilator. This witness is not being sued. She is not named in the complaint. She has no exposure. to anything that has to be defended. But she was called by the Commonwealth. And she gave the jury four things. One, the definition of hypomania. And I want to talk talk about the defense now. And I want to say up front that I'm not in a courtroom. a woman's life is on the line, and defense team knows things about this case that I do not, but I think they have chosen the wrong argument. And I want to explain why, because the reason is not really about Lindsay Clancy and it's about what has happened to all of us. The defense is running postpartum psychosis and behind it in the civil case, undiagnosed bipolar disorder. That the claim is that she had a hidden illness, that the clinicians missed it, that antidepressants were therefore contraindicated, and that giving them to her destabilized her. I understand why the argument is attractive. Legally, it's efficient. It produces a discrete, name nameable failure with a clean standard of care attached to it. You missed the diagnosis. There's a right drug for this diagnosis, and you did not give it. And then and a jury can follow that. I get it. But I look at what the argument concedes. It concedes that the drugs are medicine. It concedes that there was a correct pill and that the only problem was they reached for the wrong one. It concedes that bipolar disorder is a real biological thing that exists in nature and it's either present or or or absent in a person, like a tumor. It concedes that the failure was like diagnostic inaccuracy rather than like the entire treatment itself. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:24:03.119) I think the whole argument becomes like she was mistreated, not she was harmed by the treatment. So those sound similar, but they're opposites. One of them says the system works and somebody made an error inside of it. The other says, look what the system does when it is working exactly as designed. Now, here's the practical problem, and this is the part I would want to say to them if I were sitting there. That defense requires proving the Existence of something nobody saw, think about the burden they have taken on. They have to convince 12 people that a florid psychotic illness was present in this woman continuously from at least December through January, and that it was invisible to every single professional who examined her, invisible to her own psychiatrist across appointments, invisible to a crisis clinician, invisible to a suicide hotline, invisible to an emergency department and mass general. Twice. Invisible to a specialist at a perinatal program in Providence. Invisible to an inpatient team at McLean, which discharged her with the diagnosis major depressive disorder without psychotic features. Invisible on january twenty third, the day before. In a 17-minute appointment. And they have to do it while the Commonwealth stands up and reads out that she told every one of these people she was not hearing voices. And that's an extraordinarily hard thing to prove. It requires the jury to believe that everyone was wrong simultaneously for two months about a condition that is supposed to be fairly dramatic and impairing functioning. Should be able to see it right in front of you. Now consider what the other argument would have required. Not that she had a rare disease the doctors missed, that she was drug-induced, she was in a drug-induced state that the doctors created. Substance-induced psychotic disorder, medication-induced states. These are in the DSM. They are recognized categories. They're not fringe. And that argument does not require a hidden illness at all. It requires two things. And both of them are already in evidence. The prescribing record. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:26:13.179) Which is documented, dated, uncontested, 13 drugs, seven prescribers, 30 plus prescriptions in four months. And then there's the pharmacology, which is established, published on the labels. It has a witness too. A specialist hospital team in Providence reached that conclusion. In December, it's in writing before anyone was dead. Before there was a lawyer, before anyone had reason to say it. So compare the two burdens, honestly. One asks a jury to believe in something no professional ever observed. The other asks a jury to read a prescription list and believe a hospital chart. I know exactly why they did not do it. And it's not stupidity, it's not cowardice. It's that the alternative argument puts a medical profession on trial in a room full of people who've been taught since childhood to trust them. It asked 12 jurors from the South Shore of Massachusetts in a country. Where a very large fraction of the jury pool. Is on one of these drugs, or maybe has a child on one of them, or as a mother on one of them, to entertain the idea that psychiatric medication made a woman kill her children. Because if that is true for her, the question does not stay in that courtroom. It follows every one of them home. That is terrifying to ask a jury to accept this. And I understand why a defense attorney with one shot at this would not want to bet a woman's life on it. But there is a cost to the easier argument. And it's Not only strategic, the bipolar frame relocates the cause back into her body. Think about what it actually says that the tragedy came from a defect in her brain, which the doctors failed to detect, that there was something wrong inside Lindsay Clancy from the beginning, and the failure was nobody found it. This is not a defense of her. That is a more sophisticated version of the prosecution story. The prosecution says. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:28:12.523) Something in her made her do this and she is responsible for it. The bipolar defense says something in her made her do this and she is not. They agree on the location. They agree the answer is inside of her. They are only arguing about culpability. And the version I have laid out for you over the last hour says something different. That there was nothing wrong with her in September beyond exhaustion, insomnia, a life that became a bit unmanageable and even. Maybe she just did not want to go back to a night shift work. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:28:49.125) That she was, by her own account, in writing, starting to rub a cover without drugs, and that what happened next to her was done to her. That is the argument nobody's making in the courtroom. So I'm going to to keep making it. The defense asked to define bipolar disorder. She described distinct depressive episodes alternating with hypomanic or manic ones, not sleeping for days, a decreased need for sleep, racing thoughts, impulsiveness, irritability, patience. Describing themselves as out of control of their own behavior. Then the defense put a hypothetical to her. Would hypomatia include somebody getting up early in the morning to exercise, cleaning out their house, selling their property at the garage, difficulty sleeping, awake all night? The psychiatrist says, Yes. Now, I want to be exact about what this is and what it's not. Counsel put the pattern to her as a hypothetical, not about facts about Lindsay. So she answered as a hypothetical. Two, she discussed protective medication. The defense asked her whether an SSRI, Zoloft Prozac, should be given to a patient with bipolar disorder. Her answer was careful. She said, Well, it can, but usually alongside other medication that is protective, because a bipolar patient can be depressed and may need an antidepressant, but you pair it with a mood stabilizer, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. None of this is true. There's no such thing as a protective psychiatric drug. There's nothing that is provided that keeps some mysterious underlying illness from emerging. There is no antidepressant that's treating an underlying illness. These are blatant stories told that these doctors and that these doctors repeat over and over again without scientific support. There's no medical evidence. If I have insomnia and someone sedates me, they did not treat my insomnia. They drugged me into a new state of consciousness. I did not even get restorative sleep. If a college student downs alcohol to cope with their social anxiety, they are not treating their disease. They're taking drugs. They are emotionally blunting. Once you work from the perspective that a psychiatrist is a reputable and science-based medical professional acting from a place of safety, you are already in a fantasy world that is not real. Anything that comes from that, by definition, is inaccurate. Three, the psychiatrist mentioned the black box. The drugs asked. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:31:12.112) The defense asked her about the suicide warning on these drugs. She confirmed it. Studies show that starting an antidepressant can increase a person's risk of suicidality. Mostly documented in adolescents and young adults, she said. And then the part I want you to hear, but it can happen in adults as well. This isn't Dr. Roger McFillen, the anti-psychiatrist. This is not someone on the fringe. It's not from a book in 2004. This is a Brigham division chief called by the prosecution, telling a jury in his trial that these drugs can Make an adult suicidal. The mechanism is not in dispute. It's never been. The only thing anyone argues about is how often and And to what extent? Lindsay Clancy was a 32-year-old woman who was not suicidal in September, and we have no evidence she ever was. But she became suicidal in early December after Cerquel was added on top of two failed antidepressant trials and two benzodiazepine. She called a hotline on December 4th. She called a crisis line on December 5th. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:32:18.938) The single hardest fact against everything I've argued is that Lindsay Clancy told her clinicians she was not hearing voices repeatedly, including the day before. The defense asked this psychiatrist whether Clancy was an honest patient, whether she ex she exha exaggerated, whether she came in claiming to see visions, hearing voices, becoming suicidal, be homicidal. The answer was no. She did not claim any of it. She denied all of it. The defense pressed So this is not someone trying to exaggerate her condition for a legal reason. The witness agreed. So understand what has just been established. This is a woman facing three counts of first degree murder five days after the killings, talking to a psychiatrist. And she is under-reporting. She's denying symptoms that would help her. She has every conceivable incentive to manufacture a voice. She does not manufacture one. That is that is who was reporting to her prescribers in autumn, back in September. This is the person who told them over and over again that the drugs were making her worse. And they reported it at as poor insight. I do not know how to say this more plainly. A woman who does not exaggerate, who does not embellish, who underreports her own symptoms, even when it costs her, told a physician that a medication was harming her. And the physician wrote down that the patient lacked insight into her illness. That is your case. So specific, six specific failures, some of them, in my view, indefensible. And here's what will come of them almost nothing. There will probably be a civil settlement, likely confidential, paid by an insurer. There will be no admission of liability. There will be no license revoked. There will be no board action of consequence. And here is the hardest part to accept. And the reason I structured this episode the way I did it's not because there's a cover up, it's because of something worse. Take those six failures away, every one of them. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:34:16.665) And you are still left with a woman on 13 drugs. Because everything else in the record was standard. Child Health Psychiatry standard. 15-minute medication management visits are standard. 14 appointments with a psychiatrist who never once sat in a room with her is standard. Sequential trials when a drug fails is standard. Adding benzodiazepines for anxiety is standard. Adding an antipsychotic for insomnia standard. Escalating it when symptoms worse is standard. Five-day inpatient stays are standard because, you know, it's what utilize utilization review permits, attributing deterioration to an illness rather than a treatment standard. Coding a patient's drug harm as poor insight standard. And that's the one I can't get past. Her outpatient psychiatrist testified that she considered Lindsay Clancy to have poor insight. And the stated basis for that judgment was that Clancy kept attributing her symptoms to the drugs. She kept saying the drugs were doing this to her. That was recorded as a deficit in the patient. She told them the drugs were making her worse. They wrote that down that she lacked insight. She thought the antipsychotic was making her depressed. The testimony to the jury was that in reality, she was just depressed. A labor and delivery nurse, a woman with clinical training and direct knowledge of her own body, reporting an adverse drug reaction to a physician, and her report was not entered as data, it was entered as a symptom. Of the condition being treated. This is not medicine. This is a system that has made itself immune to any malpractice claims. When a patient reports of harm and it's coded as evidence of an illness, no quantity of harm can ever accumulate into a signal. The feedback loop is severed by design. Sixty years of iatrogenic damage have been absorbed by that single move. And this is why the accountability question has no answer. Medical boards adjudicate departures from the standard of care. They do not adjudicate the standard of care itself. If the standard is the harm, the board is structurally incapable of seeing it. I'm not calling for scapegoats. I'm telling you that the malpractice case, however, it comes out, is not the ceiling of what went wrong here. It's a floor. Now widen the lens, because this is one of the reasons I'm doing this episode. I want to go back to the Brigham psychiatrist one more time, because she said something in that courtroom. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:36:44.815) That I do not think anyone noticed, and it may be the most important thing anybody has said in this trial. The defense asked her for a simple definitional question. What does an SSRI stand for? What does it mean? And she explained it the way it has been explained to every person in the country for 40 years and has been handed one of these prescriptions that in depression, patients are lacking serotonin in the spaces in their brain. That they often do not have enough serotonin in those spaces. And the drugs work by stopping serotonin from being taken back into the cell. And there's more of it available. She said it under oath in a courtroom. And I've been screaming about this for seven years, and I'm told that no psychiatrist believes this. It's antiquated. It's not what patients are told, and it's not used to justify the drug. But she just said it. But when it landed, the response from much of the profession was not a reckoning. It was a shrug. Senior figures wrote that the chemical imbalance idea has always been a bit of a folk story, a simplification for patients, like an urban legend, that no serious psychiatrist had ever really believed it. I always found that answer very difficult to accept. And I still don't have to accept it because I watch it fail in real time. This is a courtroom. This is her testimony under oath. This is a division chief at one of the finest hospitals in the world with nothing to sell, no prescription to defend, no reason to shade anything. She's just being asked to explain what the drugs do. And what she said was it's a chemical imbalance. This is not a pamphlet, not a television advertisement from 2003. This is under oath in a murder trial of children in twenty twenty six, four years after the review, to a jury who will decide whether a woman dies in prison. This is what the field says when it has to say something out loud. So when they tell you it was only ever a simplification, ask them what it was doing on the witness stand. Ask them why it was stated. Psychiatry is so dangerous to our culture for so many reasons, but that's one of them. Keep that in mind and remember that a psychiatrist has the power to take away your freedom and lock you in a cell. Here is why this is not an academic point. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:39:03.214) Lindsay Clancy said yes to 13 drugs. She followed their medical advice. She was a labor and delivery nurse. She was not credulous and she was not passive. She hesitated over Zolof because she was breastfeeding. She refused the boost bar because she was frightened. She asked a lot of questions. And the framework she was asking from inside was the one that witnesses describe. Something is missing in your brain. We're going to replace it with this drug, this medicine. This is why you should take it. If the mechanism is not established, then what exactly did she consent to? Not whether she agreed to swallow the pill, she did. I mean, the other thing, whether the explanation she was given that she reasonably relied on and that she kept relying on all the way through October, November, and December while she got worse and worse was true. Because the story is that a drug is correcting of this deficiency, then when you deteriorate on it, the natural conclusion is that you are more deficient than they may have thought. You need more, you need another one. And that's exactly what happened to her. Every failure produced an escalation. There was no version of this story in which the drug was the problem, because the story does not contain that possibility. We now screen for perinatal mood disorder symptoms universally. A woman who's just given birth is asked to set up a set of questions at a woman when she's sleep deprived at a moment when she's sleep deprived. Her body is recovering from childbirth. Hormonally, lots of changes. She could be socially isolated in a way no other human mother in in history is ever isolated. Why? Because that's our culture. Frequently unsupported. She answers questions honestly, gets a score. She's told she has an illness, and now she's provided these poisons. Consider what we have decided. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:40:51.108) Consider the medicalization of our culture. Exhaustion after giving birth, anxiety about keeping that infant alive, grief for a former self. Look at our culture, what we've created. Women, any women who were once, you know, at times supported by a village, may get in her in-laws for a couple weeks. Husband outworking. These are not defects in any coherent reading, they are appropriate responses to circumstances. That need to be solved. And we've taken the most vulnerable like window, one of them in a woman's life, and we've made it a moment of maximum pharmaceutical exposure. What are we giving them? Dr. Roger McFillin (01:41:36.111) We're giving them these same drugs that produce these adverse reactions. Now, before anything else, I want to speak directly to the women listening who are taking these drugs right now. Do not stop them abruptly. Not after this episode, not tomorrow. Everything I've laid out about withdrawal is the reason. Look at what happened to her. The worst stretch of her life followed by abruptly stopping these drugs, increasing doses. Adding new drugs. This is the most dangerous window in all of medicine. And these prescribers created these conditions for months. Abrupt discontinuation is dangerous. It can produce the exact states that we have spent what amounts to 90 minutes here discussing. If you want to taper off, you need a slow hyperbolic taper with a competent professional. And that's the minimum. Support, nutrition, love, some time. Assistance in solving problems in your life, dealing with the real issues, not the fake chemical imbalance narrative. And if you're in the middle of it right now, if you are a woman in this story at week six, sleeping three hours at a night and frightened of your own mind, please tell someone who is there with you. Not because the system is good. You've just heard 90 minutes on how it isn't, but because being alone with it is worse. And because that there are people inside it who do actually listen. And not everyone else. Three children are dead. Their names were Cora, Dawson, and Callan. We'll spend the next several weeks arguing about whether their mother is criminally responsible. It's not the right org argument. It's been made before. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:43:13.528) It's the argument that lets the rest of us off. The real question is how a nurse who recognized something was wrong, who asked for help in September, who took the drug she was told to take, who reported every adverse effect the day it happened, who went to the emergency rooms, who called the suicide hotlines, who called the crisis lines, who admitted herself to a day program, who admitted herself to quote unquote the best psychiatric hospital in the country, who did every single thing a person is supposed to do, ended up worse at every step along the way. Remember, she did not fall through the cracks. There were no cracks. She was caught by the system at every stage. She was processed by it exactly as it is designed. This is not a failure of care. This is what the care is. Awaken to this. A revolution is needed. Thank you.