ReturnToMatriarchy

I know one thing for certain about this Lindsay Clancy trial, and I say this based on my own direct experience watching my mother suffer for years under a fistful of psychotropic medications: Nowhere near enough attention is being paid to the fact that Lindsay Clancy was cycled on and off 13 different psychotropic medications in an absurdly short window of time. For years, I watched my own mother suffer tremendously. I would never wish what my siblings and I, nor what my mother, experienced on anyone. It was hell. She didn’t sleep for days on end, didn’t eat, screamed that it felt like her skin was burning off, screamed that it felt like her brain was being zapped, sat in front of her bathroom mirror staring wide eyed without saying anything, hallucinated that she was 13 years old and I was her father, saw demons and shadowy figures in the room, was in and out of psychiatric hospitals, and attempted to end her life more than once. These drugs don’t just fail to fix people. They mask symptoms, manufacture new ones, and in some cases push people toward harming themselves or someone else—and the industry that profits from them has spent decades making sure the general public doesn’t fully grasp how often that happens. They rip people apart psychologically and physically. They rip families apart, too. I’m not on “team Lindsay” or “team Patrick,” and I don’t know what happened in that house. But the medication piece keeps getting drowned out by true crime theorizing. In the 4 months before the killings, Clancy was pumped through 13 different psychiatric medications, with over 30 total prescriptions as doses got yanked up, down, and swapped, by multiple providers who never once compared notes with each other. The publicly available data backs this up, and they’re not “fringe” in any sense: The FDA’s own 2006 review of 372 antidepressant trials (nearly 100,000 people) found a 2.3x jump in suicidality risk for patients under 25. That’s why every antidepressant in America now carries a black box warning. A 2015 Swedish national study found SSRI users aged 15-24 were convicted of violent crimes at more than 5x the rate of non users (3.3% vs 0.6%). Sertraline in particular stood out among the top-prescribed SSRIs. Roughly 1 in 4 American women is currently on some form of psychiatric medication, per the CDC’s own newest data, nearly double the rate for men. This isn’t a fringe issue at all. It’s mainstream medicine, quietly, on a massive scale. And the problems with rapid switching or cold stopping these drugs, exactly what happened to Clancy, isn’t a fringe theory: Antidepressant discontinuation syndrome is very real and can, at a minimum, trigger brain zaps, insomnia, anxiety, and suicidal ideation within days of stopping. Benzodiazepine withdrawal is one of the most dangerous withdrawal syndromes in all of medicine, capable of triggering, at a minimum, rebound psychosis, seizures, and severe agitation. I watched that happen to my own mother. Cross tapering (stopping one drug abruptly while starting another) can stack withdrawal from the first on top of side effects from the second, leaving a person destabilized from both directions at once. According to the medical system’s own ideas, psychiatric medications typically take 4-6 weeks just to reach full effect, and many require slow, deliberate tapering over weeks specifically to avoid destabilizing the nervous system. Going through 13 drugs in that same window means many of them never had time to even show whether they were “working” (which is a loaded, problematic idea, in and of itself…) before being swapped again. 13 different medications in 4 months is not normal, cautious psychiatric care, or at least it shouldn’t be. But it probably is relatively normal. And that’s the problem: it’s pure pharmacological, psychological chaos, and nobody bats an eye because this is just how the system runs…