Lindsay Clancy Trial: Two Women Betrayed

     We don’t know much about Jennifer Tufts personal life or her background, besides her training to become a psychiatrist. On the stand at Lindsay Clancy’s trial she at first seemed almost innocent and naïve, but as the questions by the defense lawyer became more pointed, she showed an understandable anger and probable need to be right about her psychiatric opinions and practice.

     She seemed far younger than her thirty-seven years. In fact, surprisingly, she’s almost the exact age as Lindsay Clancy herself.

     These two young women, each on her own side of the courtroom, are both “products” of the American psychiatric industry. Lindsay had been indoctrinated to believe that help was possible through psychiatric drugs, and Jennifer had been indoctrinated to believe that she could help others by prescribing them a medley of those drugs.

     As a nurse and a wife and a mother, Lindsay had “learned” through her profession and though the slick public marketing by Big Pharma that psychiatric medication was okay, even necessary. As a result, she had become groomed as psychiatric prey. Jennifer, by dint of her years of schooling and internships, had ended up the other side of the coin: psychiatric predator.

     Their search for psychiatric help betrayed them both.

     How similar might these two women have been in their younger years? Each chose what they believed was a healing profession, Lindsay as a nurse, Jennifer as a doctor. Each had hopes of helping others, we presume, through the medical field, but when Jennifer decided to train as a psychiatrist, she found herself in a profession with little record of making people better.

     Lindsay trusted Jennifer — at first anyway — but Jennifer trusted psychiatry. We as a country watched the results of the televised trial live in recent weeks with the two young women facing each other across the floor of the Plymouth courtroom.

     The jury apparently voted eleven to one to acquit Lindsay. They apparently recognized the differing truths about in the two women they saw, one perhaps an inadvertent predator, one an unsuspecting prey.