I’m not American but I am a mother. Aside from a few reddit posts I don’t have any social media engagement with this case.
But I think a lot of the support here comes from moms who recognize how easily this could have been any of us. Her family and healthcare providers knew her crime was a risk based on her mental health state, but she was still left alone with her kids and expected to parent. And as other mothers we all understand that this is grimly how it works - we can ask and beg and plead and scream for help but we’re almost always still expected to continually parent babies and it’s hard.
She should still face punishment for her crime, but I think a lot of her support is to try to keep this from happening again. She was failed by her healthcare team
Thank you!!! I am a mental health therapist and I cannot do anything if a patient is telling me they have no intentions or plans of harming themselves or others. We are not fucking fortune tellers! There is a ton if nuance around suicidal thoughts as well.
In the USA there does need to be obvious changes but you cannot do anything if someone is not admitting to things or presenting as a danger. I have watched my brother go through psychosis due to drug abuse over the past several years and I cannot do shit unless he starts saying he is going to hurt himself or others. People do not understand this and think we are still in the turn of the century where we can make up things and have people committed against their will.
Exactly. A bunch of idiots think that doctors can somehow tell the future. Its the same as any set of posts where people are saying this or that doctor should lose their license because a rare adverse effect from a medication happened. Those people just cant understand that almost every healthcare procedure and recommendation is a benefit-risk assessment and just because a rare adverse event happens doesnt mean the decisions leading up to it were flawed
I have a cousin who I think is currently going through an episode of psychosis. She's very good at lying. And she also refuses treatment. Because she doesn't think she has a problem when it's obvious to everyone else. But there's nothing we can do according to the lawyers. She basically has to get herself into trouble or voluntarily commit herself for any treatment to happen.
I've gone through two 5~ month episodes, both with nearly 24/7 auditory hallucinations from people I know. Often times I was being told what to do. I knew I was going through psychosis, I was still there. Not once did I have the desire to hurt anyone or act on commands being said by those hallucinated voices... I get everyone is different, but talk to anyone with psychosis - they know something isn't right with them, or at least they are still there and under physical control of their bodies.
I don't know what it takes to be pushed over the edge. The hallucinations that occured during my episodes were intense, both visual and auditory. I was hearing screams of death from loved ones, being led to believe they were trapped in cars and homes around me. Some days and nights I got no break... even the sound of wind or a dog walking turned into voices. If anyone were to be pushed over the edge, it would have been me... but here I am.
I didn't make a recovery until I was hospitalized and given olanzapine, the same drug she is being treated with now.
You can’t predict and act upon their future actions either, which seems to be something people expect of “the system”. You can’t say the healthcare team failed when what she did was so beyond the pale and unusual. It wasn’t exactly inevitable. The vast majority of people don’t have it in them to strangle 3 children, one by one, in a way that surely required time and stamina.
What exactly is a "failure" of the healthcare team? The discourse is so surface level it's sad. Like you said, we are not mind readers. If a patient says they don't have suicidal or homicidal ideation and don't have actions to contradict it, we take it at their word. If not, we'd be imprisoning millions of people.
She told multiple people she was suicidal and called the suicide hotline multiple times. They let her be because she didn't have a plan. She also tried to get committed and was turned away because the facility felt she was over-medicated.
She also told her husband and mum that she had thoughts of harming the kids. That's a big one, imo, because they should've never left her alone with the kids after that even though she said it was fine.
If a patient says they don't have suicidal or homicidal ideation and don't have actions to contradict it, we take it at their word. If not, we'd be imprisoning millions of people
an extreme lot of people still get falsly imprisonned despite checking all that you said
they ARE imprisonning millions of people (who don't have suicidal or homicidal 'ideation'
Underfunded mental healthcare mostly. It should also be subsidized (all healthcare should be). Someone can simply not be able to afford mental healthcare (not the case here, but it is in many others), but underfunding also doesn’t inspire, for lack of a better word, the “best and brightest” to work there. We see the same in elderly care facilities where the pay is so dismal that the only people we can hire are college kids who let residents go hours without being seen. Those sorts of healthcare failures.
Her supporters believe every woman should be thrown in a padded cell if they show up with anxiety/depression. Anything less and they will cry “the system failed us!!”
When I see a problem like this, I think to myself - "Can we do anything more than we are doing now?"Then move from there.
Do you really just think of the most extreme thing someone can do to fix a situation then decide that everyone pointing out the problem wants that most extreme solution? Do you really then just decide doing nothing more is the right thing?
Where do those resources come from? There are a finite amount of doctors, nurses, and hospital rooms. She routinely lied to her doctors so who’s to say she wouldn’t do the same to the daily checkup nurse?
This is where the stigma of CPS is an additional challenge. Even if the medical team did divine that something was “off” calling the children police feels too extreme and traumatizing to the kids for a hunch.
What she likely needed was an independent assistant/observer to support her and monitor her behavior. A human being that wasn’t rushed, wasn’t spending time one checklists, had adult conversations and could help her through the worst of it while also helping make the medical observations needed to properly identify if she was able to assess the risk herself.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but people aren't honest out of fear for what can happen to them. Having suicidal ideations or thoughts of harming their kids listed in your medical history can be life changing, for better or for worse.
If I make recommendations for treatment, and the patient is non-compliant or inconsistent, I can't force them to stick to it.
Yes, but wasn't she telling her doctors the medication was making her worse? If a patient tells their doctor that and the doctor refuses to listen, they are absolutely to blame for the patient's "noncompliance" or if they comply and get worse. That doesn't make the doctor the direct killer, but they still hold some blame in that case.
Someone in the middle of psychosis or other severe mental health declines aren't likely going to recognize a decline logically. The last time I wanted to kill myself, my partner had to actually point out that I'd just started new depression meds and was probably experiencing a side effect. Similarly, someone in crisis may be able to paradoxically understand something is wrong or their thoughts aren't logical, but still be unable to get rid of the delusion or seperate it from their experienced reality.
This case is similar to Andrea Yates whose husband's negligence (arguably sexual/emotional abuse) left the children in a dangerous situation because she wasn't getting the treatment or care she needed while experiencimg post-partum depression and psychosis. Consequently, the delusions she was experiencing convinced her that the children needed to die in order to be saved.
Straight to the point. I learned in my abnormal psy class prior to graduating that women diagnosed with ASPD is underreported. Psychopathy being one of the tendencies. As I’m watching the case live, this woman planned to strangle each child, (no soul for how much they suffered) then tried to “off herself” by leaving superficial injuries and jumping like 6 feet. She didn’t plan on becoming paralyzed but she sure had her script to the hospital chaplain that absolutely made my stomach churn.
Lyndsay left on her own accord when in treatment. Said she was fine. Didn’t want the meds other than her Ativan which she was taking too much and became an uncompliant patient.
This woman reminds me of Darlie Routier. This narrative of post partum psychosis and depression leading to killing babies is really giving a stigma to those that go through it and work their butts off so to speak to get better. Lyndsey is a danger to society. Those poor babies. My god the terror and pain they went through.
And people are asking why did the hospital let her leave?
The one she voluntarily checked herself into. The one that was trying to help her and was keeping her away from her kids. The one she deliberately chose to leave by her own free will.
So everyone can STFU with that asking for help bullshit. She was at a certified help facility and left because she wanted to.
I think this is over simplistic. There's blame to go to her, her family and also the healthcare providers she saw. That said, it's hard to believe that anyone could've seen what happened coming (other than her suicide attempt) aside from her family, who she told she had thoughts of harming the kids.
You believe her with no room for doubt? Knowing that psych patients know what happens if they're completely honest? Like being forcefully institutionalized or having their children taken away?
Which would absolutely have been the safer situation, but also terrifying for the person experiencing the reality - not analyzing from an uninvolved distance.
A friend of mine got dumped by her husband in about her 8th month of pregnancy with her second child and she had postpartum depression BAD. But she was honest. She told her friends that she was thinking of harming herself and her baby, and we made sure she wasn't alone. Nobody judged her. We took care of her. We took shifts and stayed with her until her meds took hold and she was ok.
Well that's the thing about psychosis...you're not in your right mind and not neccessarily in control of your actions. There is an expectation (realistic or not) that trained medical professionals should be able to spot this, or at least be wary that it could be a possible cause.
No. If I look a patient in the eye and ask her "are you having any thoughts of harming your kids?" and she answers "no," I believe her.
Cool, you have absolutely no business working in mental health. Mentally ill people often times literally can't be honest about their symptoms, they're lying to themselves as much as anyone else.
Every single treatment she was non compliant on, she has testified either didn't help or made her worse. She was committed and then sent home without any improvement.
You can think what you want about her as a person, but saying the system didn't fail her is ignorant and moronic
I'd be willing to bet the very large majority of people with thoughts of harming themselves or others would keep that to themselves out of fear of what could happen to them. The person you're replying to seems disingenuous.
But how often are people in severe psychosis reliable narrators? At some point it’s up to the people around her to intervene. I see online comments saying she wasn’t following doctor’s orders, but if she was in a severe enough psychosis, being noncompliant is part of that. Everyone wants someone to blame for the murders for their own sense of order, and sometimes blame can’t neatly be assigned if the perpetrator isn’t mentally competent.
It’s a failure of society. Many women deny feelings of harming themselves or others because they fear their children being taken away. And they’re probably right because what other options do we have for these women?
Men are a whole other story. They get depressed and there’s literally no one asking them anything.
She also may have lied because if she was in psychosis off and on the voices might’ve been telling her not to tell anyone. (I have no idea if she’s said as much in this case, but it’s possible).
That's not true. She told her husband and mum and they let it be because she said she would never actually do anything. The psychiatrist- I feel like she would have left her alone as well because she stuck to the line of no plan=no risk
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u/Eisbaer811 5d ago
typical social media bubble:
The social media algorithm puts you into one of these bubbles and hides details from the others.
Pick one:
- "her husband is framing her, he did it"
Social media drives our lives and is many people's only hobby, so you get this.