Dr. Phil McGraw addressed the Lindsay Clancy trial on Saturday, speaking out a day after a judge declared a mistrial because jurors could not agree on a unanimous verdict in the deaths of her three young children.
Clancy’s attorneys have argued that the 36-year-old mother, who has admitted to strangling her children in 2023, was experiencing postpartum psychosis and was not in control of her actions at the time of the killings.
Appearing on “Fox News Live” with anchor Aishah Hasnie, McGraw said the focus should remain on the children — Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and Callan, 8 months. They “are the real folks we need to give our attention to here,” he said, adding, “Three innocent children did lose their lives, and you can never explain these situations away simply.”
McGraw said he is troubled when mental illness becomes a courtroom battleground, warning that it can turn into “kind of a political, ideological football” used either to shape a narrative or to be dismissed by the opposing side, instead of focusing on what actually happened.
He emphasized that some form of “accountability” will ultimately come in the case. Even if Clancy is found not criminally responsible, McGraw said, “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.
McGraw also cautioned against underestimating the force of psychosis. “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 added. “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.
“We certainly don’t want that to take place here, so we need to look at what the cultural effects are,” he said.
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, but 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 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 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.”
