Dr. Phil McGraw on Saturday weighed in on the Lindsay Clancy trial, one day after the judge declared a mistrial when the jurors were unable to reach a unanimous verdict in the killings of her three children.
The defense team of the mother who admitted to strangling her three children to death in 2023 claims the 36-year-old was suffering from postpartum psychosis and wasn’t in control of her actions when she killed her children.
McGraw told Fox News anchor Aishah Hasnie on “Fox News Live” Saturday that Clancy’s children: Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months, “are the real folks we need to give our attention to here. Three innocent children did lose their lives, and you can never explain these situations away simply.”
He said it also concerns him when mental illness gets depicted in the courtroom, it becomes “kind of a political, ideological football that’s used to try to skew something or is kind of debunked by another side rather than looking at what actually took place.”
McGraw stressed that there eventually will be “accountability” in the case. Even if she’s not found criminally responsible, “she’s not going home.”
“She’s going to have to live with this the rest of her life and probably in a psychiatric facility if, in fact, she is not guilty by reason of mental defect or disease,” he said.
He added, “I think people underestimate the power of psychosis in taking over someone’s life. It’s not an excuse, but, for example, if she had a brain tumor you could see on an X-ray, people would go ‘OK, I get that.’ And when you have what took place here, it could be just as powerful as someone whose brain is hijacked by a tumor.”
“I’m not excusing what she did in any way,” he said. “I think she should be held fully accountable, but I think we need to understand causation.”
The prosecution made a “pretty clunky presentation,” McGraw said, adding that he felt they got their act together “in the end.”
“I’ve spent a lot of my professional career working in trial sciences and dealing with juries and juries looking for a coherent explanation,” he explained.
He said the defense’s explanation was “much more understandable and much more coherent than what the prosecution did.
McGraw also worried that the case could cause a “copycat” effect.
He said, “We certainly don’t want that to take place here, so we need to look at what the cultural effects are.”
There is also a “huge” difference between postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis, he stressed.
“Postpartum psychosis is a psychiatric emergency that requires immediate hospitalization,” he said. “It’s not a time to adjust medications, it’s not a time to schedule an extra appointment during the week. It is a psychiatric emergency that requires in-patient care and separation from the children. Not tomorrow morning, not tomorrow afternoon, but immediately.”
He called Clancy’s case a “psychiatric emergency that wasn’t treated as such.”
It’s one thing to use the case as a “teachable moment for the country,” McGraw cautioned, adding that it’s another for people to raise her up as some kind of “heroine.”
“There’s nothing to be celebrated here,” he said. “If there’s any lesson to be taken for our culture, it’s that there was a failure here. This was a woman who asked for help. She admitted herself to the hospital. Was that enough?”
The jury “tends to get it right,” he said, explaining that they were “headed toward committing her for a long period of time.”
“I think people need to understand that mental illness is a serious, serious issue,” he said, adding that he was worried that people would forget about Cora, Dawson and Callan.
“I hate we are focusing everywhere except there,” he said. “And there are a lot of fingers to point, but now’s not the time to do that. We need to adjudicate this case, and then we need to step back and say, ‘What can we learn from this?’
Situations like Clancy’s case “occur one or two times out of 1,000,” McGraw explained, “but that’s not nothing. One or two times out of 1,000 are one or two times too many. This is avoidable.”
His wish is that from this people would pay attention to the “red flags” depicted in Clancy’s case that can be “internalized to help mothers when they get in over their heads and need the kind of intervention that was needed here.”
“Reach out for help,” he urged. “It’s not weakness, it’s strength.”
