The Clancy Trial - Indict the Psychiatrists as Accessories to Murder

Readers don't need me to tell them that the Lindsay Clancy case has exploded into controversy and has (like everything else) been politicised. The Left and the Feminists view her as victim who should be the subject of pity and mercy. The 'tough on crime' Right views her solely as a murderer and believes she should be executed or spend the rest of her life in prison.

Either way, she's likely never getting out of custody. Given that she's paralyzed in a wheelchair (the result of a failed suicide attempt), her life will never be 'normal' again. Admittedly it might be a little better in an institution as opposed to the prison system - which is not really equipped to deal with people in that condition. We'll leave aside the sadistic elements at work in some Right-wing circles of thought and the nature of US prisons.

So whether this is a women's issue, a mental health controversy, or a strictly criminal case, the elephant in the room that nearly everyone is ignoring is the role of the psychiatrists. Those that are challenging the 'medical' industry, are not found on the Right, at least not that I've seen. They are more likely to be arguing for her exoneration. I'm not, but I do think the psychiatrists involved are guilty of malpractice, quackery, and fraud.

Clancy was on so many medications, it's hard to even keep track of it. In fact as I read through the account I find myself getting angry. I insist that when it comes to psychotropic medications, these doctors are shooting from the hip. They don't really know what these things are doing or how they work - and most importantly no one is ever healed. The whole science is in actuality a pseudo-science and more than a little subjective. I have an explanation for that but it's not one they will hear.

This does not exonerate Clancy but I do argue these doctors bear at least some culpability for what happened. At the very least they should lose their licenses and in some cases (I don't know the specifics here) they should face criminal charges.

I'm reminded of the similar case of Andrea Yates who drowned her five young children in June 2001 - a huge media moment that got drowned out by other events toward the end of summer and in the following years. The media focused on Michael Woroniecki, a street preacher that had some contact with Yates and her husband. It's argued that her psychosis (and the motive for the murders) was connected to either prophetic delusions or the idea that by killing them before the age of accountability they would be saved from damnation. I've actually heard people like Charles Colson utilize this twisted argument to justify the US and Israeli killing of Muslim civilians. In other words kill them before they grow up and become Muslims and they'll be saved. It reminds me of the evil Arnaud Amalric at the 1209 siege of Beziers - kill them all, God will know His own.

By this logic, abortion should be seen as a net good. I would think the many racist White Evangelicals and others on the Right would celebrate the abortion of minority babies - after all they're just going to grow up and end up criminals, right? If you kill him in the womb, they'll go to heaven - or so the aberrant logic goes.

In the case of Clancy, the motives are less clear. It all seems to circle back to self-absorption - which I contend is the self-idolatrous, self-referential sin at the core of most mental illness. But then when you dope up a person to the point where they live in a fog or in other instances when stimuli are exaggerated, as well as the emotional response to them, then minor issues can become major ones and major problems turn into tragedies.

She's guilty, she killed the children, no one disputes that but what if the medications amplified certain tendencies, confused judgment, played with emotions, and aggravated fears? Of course going off the medications can sometimes be tragic as well - something like that happened with Yates.

The whole thing is a tragedy and yet I believe a great deal of blame lies with the psychiatric community and their quack medicine that alters perceptions of reality and opens people up to influences that otherwise they might be able to resist - or need to on a spiritual level. Turning them into zombies subject to 'trigger' reactions is no solution and its not medicine.

Clancy will have to suffer the consequences of her actions but how many of these 'doctors' go on prescribing 'medications', twisting minds and destroying lives? How many of these same types condemn people for life to institutions, convince them to mutilate themselves in the name of authenticity, and foster things like divorce in the name of mental health? In fact I believe this industry (for that's what it is) bears a great deal of blame for the collapse of parenting and schooling in contemporary culture, as well as a great deal of the identity-driven polarization that has entered politics. When will they be held accountable?

Not by the Church, that is until the American Church (or segments of it) dare to take on this issue and reconfigure their thinking. Even in Reformed circles, the Nouthetic Counselling model championed by Jay Adams has largely been corrupted and replaced by a hybrid model that represents a serious departure from Biblical frameworks, let alone Biblical wisdom. The modern American Church has fully embraced psychology to the point that words like idolatry come to mind - as well as judgment.

And now with the waxing of materialist thought, we're seeing more and more of psychology and psychiatry being shaped by discussions of biology, brain chemistry, neurochemicals and the like. And as I've been writing about for some time (usually in reference to groups like Focus on the Family), this sort of thinking is starting to redefine the nature of spiritual realities and concepts like anxiety, repentance, and faith. By the metrics they use, one should be able to take a pill and reproduce the effects of faith, hope, and love. Next they're going to tell us why (on a material level) taking communion is a blessing - because it releases certain hormones and neurotransmitters that strengthen our resolve and teach our minds to think in community-based patterns.

I contend these people are setting the stage for a future large-scale defection to atheism. In fact I think some would argue it's already happening. Everyone keeps talking about revival when there's just as much evidence for massive large-scale apostasy. And many of these defectors are not just abandoning 'the faith' but any kind of faith at all, and many of them are embracing materialistic atheism. The numbers are in the millions. Granted, many did not come from remotely sound churches to begin with, but the numbers are pretty stark.

Though Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) got the ball rolling (so to speak), his erroneous psychoanalytic notions were replaced long ago by paradigm that some deem to be more scientific - evidence-based outcomes in behavioural psychology and the biological-medical approaches found in psychiatry. It's worth re-stating, I don't think we fully appreciate how much this has changed the world. It has transformed parenting, education, marriage, and has played out in concepts of the self, feminism, and the normalisation of things like homosexuality. It has fully invaded the Church, shaping concepts of pastoral counseling, ecclesiology, and personal piety. It has been every bit as impactful as the atomic bomb. And I think with the AI revolution knocking at our door, we're going to see a new spectrum of outcomes.

Those whom the gods would destroy they first drive mad....

Obviously as Christians we have a slightly different take on that, but for my part I do believe the rise of modern psychology constitutes judgment from on high. I'm reminded of the words of the apostle - for the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God.

In the meantime, I contend these psychiatrists bear at least some responsibility for what happened with the Clancy children. As the Church, we're not going to fix society, and getting the Babylonians to ape Christian concepts and actions neither glorifies God or helps the Church. It just leads to confusion. What can we do then? We can run psychiatry out of the Church, exposing it and denouncing it for what it really is - the pseudo-religion of humanism. One need not agree with all that critics like the Bobgans say about psychology and yet we can agree with them that when it enters the Church and is combined with Christian nomenclature and concepts, it is a heresy.