Should Massachusetts mother, Lindsay Clancy, have been charged? Many would suggest that it’s a judicial travesty that Clancy was literally drugged out of her mind and those who prescribed the drugs have escaped responsibility and continue to work in the field.
It’s like a bad movie that keeps getting replayed. Mothers are drugged out of their minds, kill their children, and prosecutors never address an obvious possible cause of the tragedies and who really is responsible. The Clancy case is a rerun. We’ve seen it before and, with the ever-increasing number of women in the United States who are drugged at record numbers, it’s time to call out what is occurring when psychiatric drug prescriptions are written without the serious consideration about possible deadly adverse events.
It’s AbleChild’s guess that the doctors prescribing Clancy’s drug cocktail, either never understood all the possible adverse events or simply ignored them. It wouldn’t be the first time. Recall that Texas mother, Andrea Yates, killed her five children in 2001 after having been prescribed a cocktail of antidepressants, sedatives and antipsychotics.
One of the drugs Yates received, Effexor (Venlafaxine), is a powerful antidepressant that carries Homicidal Ideation as a side effect. In fact, in the month leading up to Yates killing her children, her psychiatrist, Mohammad Saeed, had increased her daily dose of Effexor to twice the recommended maximum limit (450mg). TWICE THE MAXIMUM LIMIT. Haldol, Wellbutrin, Remeron and Trazodone made up the rest of Yates’s mind-altering drug cocktail.
Despite clear evidence that Yates had been heavily drugged, a jury found Yates guilty of the murders and now lives in a psychiatric hospital. Yates psychiatrist, Dr. Mohammed Saeed, still is active in the Houston area. The problem with not holding psychiatrists responsible for the mind-altered behavior of these women is that the cocktail drugging may continue with future patients.
Saeed is still practicing and never received any professional fines, disciplinary actions or criminal charges for his “treatment” of Andrea Yates. Yates spends life behind bars for the murders of her five children that by all accounts were loved and well-cared for. Fast forward to Lindsay Clancy.
By all accounts, Clancy was a loving mother and a dedicated labor and delivery nurse. In fact, her colleagues wrote letters of support describing Clancy as highly compassionate, serene and a dedicated professional in maternal health. Clancy was all those things until seeking help for anxiety about returning to work after the birth of her last child. Clancy was diagnosed with postpartum anxiety, depression, insomnia, depression-related sleep disturbances, bipolar disorder and mood regulation. It is important to stress that none of these alleged mental disorders are actual abnormalities in the brain. It also is necessary to point out that the pharmaceutical companies who manufacture the drugs nor the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that approves the drugs, has any specific information about how the drugs work for any alleged mental disorder.
For example, Clancy was on five different antidepressants including Zoloft, Prozac, Amitriptyline, Remeron and Trazadone. The FDA reports on all the above drugs that how the drugs work is either “presumed to be linked to…” or “is not known.” Simply put, the drug approval agency for the United States hasn’t got a clue how these drugs “work” in the brain as “treatment” for any alleged mental disorders.
Clancy also was prescribed Benzodiazepines and Sedatives including Valium, Klonopin, Ativan and Ambien of which the FDA admits in its “Mechanism of action” section of approval that it has no clue how any of these drugs “work” in the brain as “treatment. “Thought to…,” “unknown…,” “presumed to be…”, and “hypothesized…” is how the FDA explains how these drugs “work.” So far, we’re batting 100 percent on clueless.
Now let’s look at the Antipsychotics and Mood Stabilizers that include Seroquel and Lamictal and what the FDA has to say about how these mind-altering drugs “work” as “treatment.” Not surprising, the FDA is clueless about how either drug “works” and reports the mechanism of action for both is “unknown.”
Moving along to the adverse events associated with the nearly 13-drug cocktail that Clancy was prescribed over a two-month period, it is clear that the mother’s behavior could easily be ascribed to the adverse events associated with each class of mind-altering drugs.
For example, adverse events associated with antidepressants include restlessness, anxiety (which Clancy was being “treated” for), confusion, mood and behavior changes, abnormal dreams, depression, memory impairment, delusions, insomnia, agitation, emotional lability, hostility, mania, abnormal thinking, depersonalization, manic reaction, paranoid reaction, psychosis, aggression, suicidal thoughts and behavior and suicide attempt to name a few.
Benzodiazepines and Sedatives can cause agitation, change in consciousness, mood and mental changes, nightmares, irritability, behavior problems, aggressive behavior and reaction, anger, anxiety, depersonalization, hallucinations, hostility, delusions, psychosis, psychotic disorders, and suicide ideation.
Finally, Antipsychotics and Mood stabilizers have, as possible, adverse effects, agitation, abnormal dreams, anxiety, depression, irritability, suicidal ideation, suicide related events (like homicide), delusions, depersonalization, hallucinations, delirium, paranoid reaction, psychosis and emotional lability.
What the FDA, pharmaceutical companies, and especially the prescribing doctors, don’t tell patients is that none of these drugs are ever tested in clinical trials as cocktails. In other words, the makers of Zoloft and the makers of Klonopin, for example, don’t get together and conduct clinical trials to see how the drugs “work” together. And there certainly are no known clinical trials available for review of these 13 drugs prescribed to Clancy that have tested together.
Based on what the FDA does not know, Clancy’s psychiatrist and nurse practitioner, writing psychiatric mind-altering drug prescriptions, also have no idea how the drugs “work” nor how all the drugs will react in anyone’s system…especially Lindsay Clancy’s system. The fact is, not one of the mental health practitioners could guarantee that Clancy would NOT have serious adverse effects from a single drug and most certainly not from a cocktail of mind-altering drugs.
The fact that the possible side effects are made available by the FDA should make it mandatory for prosecutors to consider the drugs possible involvement in any criminal case. Further, the fact psychiatrists and other mental health care practitioners are prescribing mind-altering drugs with no certainty about how the drugs “work” as “treatment” or know how the drugs “work” together, it is time to consider the prescribers role in criminal proceedings.
One must wonder when Clancy’s mental health care team finally understood that the drug cocktails they had prescribed weren’t “working?” If there was ever a case of deadly drug cocktail prescribing, this would be it.
AbleChild would argue that the tragedy is, once again, the mental health and pharmaceutical industry has escaped any responsibility for the death of three innocent children, and the ruin of a loving mother. It’s happened before, and until these issues are addressed, it will happen again.
AbleChild is a 501(3) C nonprofit organization that has recently co-written landmark legislation in Tennessee, setting a national precedent for transparency and accountability in the intersection of mental health, pharmaceutical practices, and public safety.
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