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Adult ADHD from the board-certified PMHNP behind the YouTube channel Focus Path and the book The Process. Clinical perspective on medication, frameworks, and the conversations the internet hasn't been having.
This is Actually ADHD.
Welcome back.
I'm your host, Jonathan Murphy,
psychiatric nurse practitioner
Actually ADHD is sponsored by
the Focus Path YouTube channel.
I got some great content over there
on YouTube for you, and it seems like
YouTube's finally allowing more than
just a handful of people to see it.
You can check it out at @FocusPathSystems
on YouTube.
Nonetheless, This is something that
is a bit of a departure from my normal
content, but it is in the sphere of
mental health, which is the Lindsay
Clancy trial, if you've heard about it.
. So I'm gonna talk about the things that
other people haven't talked about, and
I'm not gonna get into the grisly details.
I've cried several times just looking
at the pictures and thinking about it.
So I don't wanna go into that.
But if you're not into hearing about
things that are messed up that happened in
our daily life, then come back next time.
But for the rest of you, the
Lindsay Clancy case, you've
probably heard the details.
it's a mother out of Duxbury,
Massachusetts, which also happens to be
my hometown, although I don't know any
of these people, and I haven't been there
in years, nor do I plan to ever go back.
So Lindsay Clancy has admitted
to murdering her three young
children, and that happened in 2023.
So there's a tons of opinions on this,
and people are divided, so much so
that really that's what I hope to do in
this podcast is talk about how you can
filter this information and understand
it because the noise is out of control.
And we as people need to understand
how to learn, and media literacy is
something that I've really become
passionate about because before we absorb
information, we need to set the terms.
So that's maybe the first place to start.
Why are we all talking about this?
When it happened, the media reported
on it, and it's in a local community,
and I understand Duxbury very well.
when I was growing up, it's just
a perception of a nice place.
People find out online and it spreads,
and what I saw immediately, Of
course, I heard through the grapevine.
There's a grapevine in this town.
The whole town is one big grapevine.
So this is what happened right after.
Kaboom.
I said, "Whoa, symptom
of a bigger problem."
But that was just my
gut, my initial reaction.
A lot of information came out right away.
I thought that was very
interesting from the get-go.
as soon as I heard about this, it is
like, "Oh, it's already cleaned up.
Oh, no, the guy thatâ¦"
I'm like, "Oh, no, that's horrible.
That's hor-" You know, what are theâ¦
Is it married?
What about the husband?
No, the husband's already okay with it.
There's a GoFundMe, . and
everyone's celebrating.
Yay.
It's What's happening here, and I could
tell right away, is everyone's trying
to clean it up, clean up the mess.
And that happens after a tragedy, is
that we collectively try as humans to
come together and clean up this mess.
And with social media,
this is how hysteria starts, social
contagion and social hysteria.
It's because people don't have
media literacy, and you can
read, Mortimer Adler, the How
to Read a Book changed my life.
But there's lots of good
information about literacy and just
understanding logic, let's say.
It's not that complicated.
We just have to go, "All right.
What do I know?
Let's go from there.
How do I get information?
How do I know what I know?"
right away you hear like, "Oh no,
she was crazy," and da, da, da, da.
you know, as the nurse practitioner
and someone who's worked in psychiatry
and understands the town, I was
like, "Hmm," right off the bat.
Because psychosis postpartum
depression is a real problem.
Postpartum depression.
I think it's unfortunate that there's
a wagon being hitched to this case,
and what's really disturbing about
it is that the defense of this woman
is doing it on purpose You know,
if you have the mob on your side.
The mob is what causes governments
to topple and regimes to change.
So of course you can disrupt
even the legal system.
So it's up to us civil adults to
stop and hold the line and engage
in civil discourse respectfully.
However, the great thing
about this situation is that
It's going to become a good example
of our legal system at work.
It's such a televised case and
it's, hits home as a narrative
and media's spreading it.
But it's not something you
need to know about really.
A mother kills a child every three days.
Postpartum psychosis affects one in 2,000.
? look At a study, Brown
University FBI arrest data,
32-year longitudinal analysis.
The rate has been stable for 32
years the thing about living in
Duxbury, Massachusetts or on Cape
Cod or even just south of Boston,
people don't talk about this.
They talk about the South Shore.
And I used to always grow up
thinking, "I don't like it here."
Like, "I don't like it here."
It's kinda like gaslighting when
everyone's telling you that the town you
live in is the best town in the world.
And it is an affluent
community, and that's cool,
but my family wasn't affluent.
Oh, I had friends that were on boats.
That was cool.
But I would've rather have not
grown up in a dysfunctional family
and been around just whatever.
All that glitters is certainly not gold.
My wife and I started exploring
the Pacific Northwest, and I
looked at a map, looking at maps,
and I realized, "Wait a minute.
Two ecosystems.
Covering Massachusetts and New England.
I'm like, "Wow, wait a minute."
So then there's this little dot, it's
just like Cape Cod, and it's like pink.
I'm like, "Wait a minute,
that's a different ecosystem?
What?
Oh my gosh."
Like, that's why.
So there's two places in the world that
are as miserable as the Pine Barrens.
The two places the Pine Barren exists.
It's low level.
Like you're gonna say, um, sea level,
rocks, the vegetation is scarce.
William Bradford in his records
from showing up, "It's bitter cold."
It's the first thing he had to say
about Plymouth Rock, bitter cold.
So why is it seen as such
a beautiful place to live?
The ideal conditions for the
beach down there are rare.
Rare, rare, rare.
But the tradition of the
land is that of maritime.
So if you're out there like tying
boat knots and doing all the water
sports, and you're out there on
the water, then that's great.
And most people know the traffic.
Most people know the overpopulation.
Most people know the
keeping up with the Joneses.
If you're listening to
this, most people know.
Most people know, everyone knows.
But yet it still draws, and
it's extraordinarily expensive.
I couldn't even afford to
live there if I wanted to.
The traffic from Plymouth, Duxbury
to Boston, you have to take the
expressway to Boston, and it's
bumper to bumper every single time.
I couldn't believe it.
Bumper to bumper.
And if you don't like
traffic, , it's an everyday thing.
You're constantly confronted with
bumper to bumper But people love it
because it's a very social environment.
There's a lot of positives.
You know, a lot of
people love living there.
However, if you don't live there, If
you never lived there before, then
I could see you'd have a hard time
adjusting to it, and that's the first
thing I heard with Lindsay Clancy.
She's not from the s- the Pine Barrens.
So I thought, "Oh, wow."
'Cause what people need to reckon with
is the winter, and anyone will tell
you it is miserable in the winter.
Like think Cape Cod when everyone leaves.
It becomes a very sad, depressing
place because in the woods in
here in New Hampshire, it snows.
There's a forest that just
holds onto that snow, and it
sort of is a winter wonderland.
That doesn't happen in,
on the Pine Barrens, no.
It's wind-stripped and ice daggers of rain
pouring down at you, and it's unrelenting.
I think I've painted the picture well now.
I'm thinking to myself, " Wow.
This woman had to live there, and she
has three kids, and then she also works
MGH as a labor and delivery nurse."
And I'm thinking, "What?
Who would sign up for that?"
So every single day of your life,
you have to wake up Look at a map,
Duxbury, Massachusetts, to Boston.
Up there in MGH, that's not like Quincy.
That's up there.
You have to drive bumper to
bumper, bumper to bumper.
And when you get there, if you do
get there, you're working your butt
off to be a labor and delivery nurse,
and it's a beautiful thing to do
that job but what's the incentive?
So Facebook, it's like you
look at the Facebook page, it's
like, whoa, this person , is
the most perfect human in the world.
It's Facebook though.
You have to curate that.
You have to take time to do that.
You have to put that stuff up there.
But people that have personality
disorders are more likely to be
on there, because what's the gain?
It's called narcissistic supply.
Other people doing things that
affect other people matter,
or affecting other people, the
perception, it matters to people.
So here's how it breaks it.
Let me break it down, because people are
saying, "This is a mental health problem.
It's a mental health problem."
Here's the deal.
Mental health and psychiatry, psychology,
it comes from a place of a discipline,
you know, think back to Sigmund Freud, of
understanding the origin of mental states.
how they think, why they
do the things they do.
So mental health care is a way
of assigning treatment for mental
distress or treatable things.
let's Say pathologies that resolve.
'Cause as adults, we're, we're supposed
to be responsible for ourself and what
we do, and there are consequences, right?
'Cause we live in a
civil society with laws.
So the first responsibility we have is to
obey the law, and we wanna live in a world
that, uh, you know, we're gonna be safe.
So mental health is making sure that
people's state of mind is conducive
for, thriving, living a good life,
staying in a good state of health,
directing yourself where you want to,
regulating yourself, and not having
anyone else be harmed in the process.
But as a nurse practitioner or
psychiatrist or provider that
provides medication it seems like
people aren't aware of what goes on.
It's just like anything else.
It's, you book an appointment, it's
someone's choice to get treatment,
I practice psychotherapy as well as
prescribe medicine, so the manual is very,
very clear, which makes it really easy.
A minimum knowledge about how this stuff
works is gonna be able to help people
But it, from there, it's a starting
point and you get better at your job.
Postpartum psychosis, that's
something more in the, the
specialty of women's health, 'cause
we're getting into specialties.
You have your psychiatry,
mental health, psychology.
As they found with psychology,
mental health, and all this
stuff, people still go to jail.
Still people still kill each other.
People still go crazy.
that's where you get into
personality disorders.
So because people lie, kill, steal,
and cheat and all this other stuff,
and always will, because humans
always will be humans, then we can
kinda understand why they do it.
And I think it's good to do this because
narcissistic personality disorder
and antisocial personality disorder
are really those last kind of things.
"Why are people killing?
Why are people doing this stuff?"
Usually you can understand the behavior
by applying a personality disorder.
A personality disorder
is, like, largely fixed.
state that is reinforced and
learned can be resolved, but
it depends on how fixed it is.
So now we're gonna go into the
sweeping up of the narrative so you
have two sides of the coin down there.
You got people that wanna
say, "This is horrible.
Clean it up."
Howâ¦
Like, 'cause that's the strong,
the "get her outta here."
"Look what you did.
This is horrible."
And I understand that, but
we've come a long way, right?
We're trying to be more gentle as
a society, you know, the including
everyone and everything, and it's
just everyone has a voice now online,
mob mentality is a scary thing,
we got two divided camps, and
that postpartum thing didn't
occur till after she was in jail.
It wasn't mentioned before.
And she told him to go
get takeout in Plymouth.
She gave him a list of all these
things, and when I heard Plymouth, I was
like, " Duxbury to Plymouth for food?
You kidding me?"
That's like you're traveling to
another universe, depending on
how bumpity bumpa the traffic is.
so you got this group psychology.
Now we got the mob, okay?
We wanna understand the mob, and
I've talked about this on the YouTube
channel There's a group psychology
video, and I talk about the group.
They don't think logically, and your
brain, if you're not too careful, we
can get sucked in to When you go into
a video, never just go to the comments,
'cause what you're doing is you're
asking to be put into an echo chamber.
You're Asking to just go into
groupthink unless you know how
to navigate the comment section.
The way to understand this stuff is you
go to the experts, and you listen to what
they're saying and process it yourself,
and then you understand the dynamic.
When you see people that
are out of controlâ¦
And a lot of people don't navigate
comment sections and choose not to
leave comments or make statements.
It's really a way to make a statement.
You have to understand, you have to
feel good about what you're writing,
but it's no different than talking.
You have to understand what you're
putting out there and feel good about
what you're putting out there, but
you certainly need to understand your
emotional state , and be regulated before
you just start talking about things.
And this is hard for people as soon
as you hear it, 'cause the media
is shoving it in people's faces.
Why?
Cha-ching.
We have to think about the media.
We have social media now, and
then you have the media, and
the two like fuel each other,
But it doesn't necessarily
have to be that way.
If there was a more informed public that
understand and understood media ethics,
and I'd ask any content creator to think
about this too, to encourage individual
thinking,, and understand these mechanisms
so we can have an actual interesting
conversation about this or understand
what this means, and we all can move
forward just being a bit less naive.
If there's one thing we need
to look at is how naive to say,
"Look at the Facebook picture.
She was the perfect person.
Da-da-la-la-la."
This person said that.
That is the experience if you grow up
at home with a toxic parent, as I did.
You know that everyone in the world
says that about your toxic parent.
That's how it works.
They're the greatest person in the world,
and then you go home, and you shut the
door, and they're a different person.
And I hear monstrous behavior.
There was strangulation,
and it's just so gruesome
so the way the prosecution's been
laying out this case from the beginning
has been highly criticized because
it's been focusing on the grisly
details, the facts of the case.
And right away, these facts are,
like, more damning and more damning.
, And what's gonna happen is it's
gonna become increasingly more
unhinged as times goes on because
the group is governed by three ideas.
Sentiment, it's like the
emotional sort of reasoning.
It's a very relatable thing.
It's like this poor woman, because so
many women struggle out there, alone
with, like, depression or anxiety or
whatever, like, that the struggle is real.
But what she did is a little different.
But the legal team are well aware
of this, so they weaponize the mob.
So they reinforce the mob, and
it becomes like a sort of cult.
And then they can only see logic
doesn't, like, exist outside of
this, even really smart people.
So if you don't understand how this works,
you can really get sucked into this stuff.
People get sucked into echo chambers.
the Idea is that , , she wasn't
in control of her actions.
She didn't mean to.
She didn't know what she was doing.
I was surprised how many, because
I think the loudness of the
mob skewed the response because
people didn't wanna upset anybody.
But as time goes on, 'cause the first
thing I said, I'm like, "I think,
what about personality disorder?",
The most logical thing,
differential diagnosis-wise.
But for a perfectionist to go down
there when you don't know there,
I said, " Whoa January, February,
you're in for a rude awakening.
Going to work in Boston, bumper
to bumper, up to MGH, and you
just had three, like, kids.
Like, that's so hard.
And, and it's irrational.
Like, these choices,
they convey poor insight.
The combination of all these choices,
you put them together and you look
at them and you say, "Wow, there's
poor insight into her actions."
And I think we're continuing to
see a manifestation of that because
there's probably poor judgment
to continue with this charade.
But she's getting a lot of attention,
and for someone with narcissistic
personality disorder or antisocial
personality disorder, they're going
to benefit from media coverage.
And the conspiracy theory piece is
now, even though she's admitted to it,
and even though the testimony of the
husband, he looks extremely traumatized,
and they wouldn't even listen to the,
uh, the 911 call, and I saw people
just talking about the 911 call.
And you can be traumatized according
to the DSM, because you were in
there listening as part of your
job in the media to the 911 call.
That's trauma.
' Cause it's secondary trauma,
'cause someone is screaming a
blood-curdling scream when they
find their three kids dead.
. It was clear to me this
guy was highly traumatized.
But if you're married to someone with
a narcissistic personality disorder,
the, the manipulation is high, and
he fits the profile of a sort of
dependent personality disorder.
We sort of even each other out in a way.
But we're going into just two humans, two
people's lives, and it resonates deeply
because it's a mirror on everything.
But she knew what she was doing,
and the facts support that,
and the system's not perfect.
And then there's the medicine
piece too, which I looked at the
medicine and, she was getting Valium.
I've never even prescribed that.
The only way you'd get that is
if you were a nurse asking for
it, likely drug-seeking behavior.
I believe the facts support, like my
gut, as time goes on, it's clear to
me that she, , exhibits,, signs of
a narcissistic personality disorder.
I don't need to go into it
further because then you start
to think about sad, you know.
And this stuff happens.
It's a part of the
human experience, right?
Everyone in jail does something bad.
What it's eliciting, this tribal response,
the, the group because they have to
function on ideas, sentiment, and custom.
The custom being like, ignore
the evidence, I suppose.
They're gonna break down.
So this is how the misinformation spreads.
Among the tribe they get the, the public
record documents, and you don't have a
legal expert like filtering information.
If, if you don't have an expert
filtering the information,
you don't have the context.
So you're just cherry-picking,
and then you're giving it to the
mob to support what the mob wants.
I saw this in the ADHD world with like
medication side effects that, I never
saw in my office, but people would talk
about because they were reading, , FDA
labeling without the understanding of a
prescriber's, , job and what it looks like
and what their reasoning would be like.
So you need a filter of this
specialized information.
That's why there's so many legal
experts online talking about this,
that it's great to just go there.
What people started doing is hi- like
started looking at Patrick, at like the,
the husband, scrutinizing his behavior.
"Maybe he did it.
He's did it.
It's his fault."
But meanwhile, there's no
evidence of that, and the trial
has never been about that.
But if you look at the statistics
of this, it's not abnormal.
It's shocking because it hits
close to home for so many people.
ch-things Change, people stay the same.
But let's go back in time.
This has been happening since the
papers came out in the late 1800s.
They decided to publish the crime
statistics and people went crazy.
So fear and all this stuff sells,
Well, we think, "Oh, this is horrible.
Why is this happening so much?
It's happening more."
Well, no.
And it's perception.
Media affects the way we perceive
the world, you gotta understand the
reaction 'cause we can get sucked into
these wormholes and into these echo
chambers, and that's the biggest problem.
And this case has become such
a huge one, as well as this
idea of true crime in general.
We just have to understand what
we're putting into our head and
understanding if it's not something
that we want in our head while we're
reinforcing society to keep putting
into people's heads, I suppose.
I think that this case highlights
the danger of personality disorders
and if nothing else, People's
ability to be controlled and sucked
into a mob through the media, and
I see a lot of comments out there.
The trial is simply one thing:
Is she gonna be considered
insane or is she gonna be guilty?
And it's highly divided because,
and it's been from the beginning,
from the layers I discussed.
I
just hope that brought some
context There's a million other
people talking about the rest.
So next time I'm gonna get back
to what I normally talk about,
which is ADHD, on Actually ADHD.
My name is Jonathan Murphy,
psychiatric nurse practitioner.
Talk to you later.