This week I joined NewsNation's "Katie Pavlich Tonight" (guest-hosted by Lauren Wright) to discuss the Lindsay Clancy trial as the jury weighs one of the hardest questions in criminal law: when severe mental illness takes hold, can a person be held responsible for what follows?
My view is that Clancy is not simply a perpetrator, but someone failed by a mental health system.
I also tried to be honest about the limits of my own field. Psychiatry is, in many ways, the "stepchild of medicine" — unlike a cardiologist with an EKG, we have no objective test to prove that a psychosis was present. Yet that is exactly what a jury is now being asked to determine. In Clancy's case, her illness had progressed to delusions she could not be reasoned out of and hallucinations that directed her behavior. At that point, she was an involuntary person, and thus she should not be held responsible.
Watch the full NewsNation segment on the Lindsay Clancy trial.