Were Psychiatric Drugs a Factor in the Lindsay Clancy Case? A Psychiatrist Weighs In

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Rich Zeoli: Everyone’s talking about the Lindsay Clancy case. She is the woman, the mother, who’s accused of killing her three children. I think it’s pretty obvious that she did it, but nevertheless, the trial’s ongoing right now. She also attempted to kill herself. She was on a lot of different medications, and I have a lot of questions, and you have a lot of questions, so I am very, very happy to welcome to the show a man who can answer those questions for us. He’s Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring, a psychiatrist and co-founder of the Taper Clinic, a private practice that is primarily based in Palm Desert, California. I’m on their website right now: “Taper off psychiatric medications the right way.” Dr. Witt-Doerring, thanks for joining us.

Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring: So happy to be here with you.

Rich Zeoli: Why is it important, first of all, to taper off your psychiatric meds? And do you have to taper off all of them, or are there ones that you really have to be particularly attentive to?

Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring: So it’s important to taper off these medications because many doctors often do it too fast, and the withdrawal can be really dangerous. Now, whether or not you should come off depends on your specific circumstances and whether coming off the whole way makes sense, or whether just coming down to a lower amount is a better idea. Again, it’s per person. For some people, they don’t need to come off; they’re working just fine. And usually it’s just when someone is having a lot of side effects from medications that tapering off becomes something they should do.

Rich Zeoli: I’ve heard getting off the benzos is very, very difficult, and the tapering can take a long time. Is that true?

Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring: It can be absolutely brutal, and we’ve seen this turn up with Dr. Jordan Peterson over the last couple of years. He’s been very outspoken about his difficulty coming off benzodiazepines. And the issue is that, for a small group of people, they can actually cause serious side effects that are like neurological harm, and they can linger like a traumatic brain injury, like a football player who has a concussion, sometimes for years after they have this side effect. So they can be very challenging drugs, with the side effects and also the withdrawal syndrome when you come off.

Rich Zeoli: Looking at this case of this mom who, of course, is accused, Lindsay Clancy, who’s become a household name here, she was on several diazepams. She was on diazepam, which a lot of people know as Valium. She was, I believe, on another benzo at one point as well. She was on quetiapine, Klonopin. She was on zolpidem, mirtazapine. I mean, she was just on a boatload of buspirone. Am I saying that correctly? Probably not.

Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring: Yeah, buspirone.

Rich Zeoli: Buspirone. Okay. Is that also a benzo?

Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring: No, that’s an antidepressant. The two benzos she was on–she was on Valium, which I know most people have heard of, and then Klonopin.

Rich Zeoli: Yeah, yeah, that’s the one. And is that a pretty common drug?

Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring: Yeah, it’s one of the most common benzos, along with Xanax and Klonopin. And I think about 8% of the U.S. population are taking these benzodiazepine medications now.

Rich Zeoli: They gave it to me when I was having heart surgery to help with the pain. I was lucky I wasn’t on it for a long time, but it seems like she was on these drugs for years and years. And the first question I have for you, Dr. Witt-Doerring, is when you’re combining these antidepressants, you’re combining the anti-anxiety medications all together like this, do they have effects when they’re combined? And do the doctors monitor for that?

Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring: You know, we don’t really know the impact of taking multiple psychiatric meds. This is one of these things that the public thinks is well established, these cocktails of psych drugs. I used to work at the FDA and in the pharmaceutical industry, developing these drugs. They’re never studied in combination. So it’s kind of just like this black box of what happens.

What’s most relevant to the Lindsay Clancy case is that right before she takes the lives of her three children and throws herself out the window, there’s a good chance she’s in benzodiazepine withdrawal, because she’d been on them for months, and then she was tapered in about 14 days. So she’s in withdrawal from benzos.

And she was also put on a drug, amitriptyline, which is an antidepressant, which she shouldn’t have been put on because it’s looking like she has a history of bipolar disorder. And if you have a history of bipolar disorder and you get put on an antidepressant, it can often trigger mania and sometimes even psychosis. And that’s what the defense is arguing: that this psychotic episode is what triggered her killing her children.

Rich Zeoli: Now, doctor, obviously she says she was suffering from postpartum depression. Was she being treated for that with any of these drugs, as far as you know?

Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring: Yes, she was, and she was getting fairly standard treatment, but it just went off the rails. Following the birth of her third child, she developed depression, and she was put on Zoloft, which is an SSRI, a very common antidepressant medication. And it just made her worse.

This is about five months before the incident. So she gets on the Zoloft, and that’s supposedly meant to help her postpartum depression, but it causes insomnia. They double the dose. It makes it even worse. They try a different SSRI, Prozac. That makes her worse as well. And every single time they try one of these drugs, she continues to deteriorate.

And there’s actually a malpractice case going on because they’re trying to allege that her care was very poor and that’s why this happened. And there is a good argument for that, because the one thing that went really wrong in her care was they kept on just trying more and more medications with her, and they were making her worse. They were causing her side effects, and they needed to try something else.

Rich Zeoli: So when you were at the FDA and you tell me they have these cocktails, these psychiatric cocktails, and they don’t know how these drugs interact with each other, then they’re adding, they’re doubling the dosage of a lot of these drugs. They’re throwing more things into this cocktail, but none of this is ever studied. So effectively, I mean, Clancy’s kind of like a guinea pig here, right?

Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring: She is. And, you know, I think this is one of those “but for the grace of God” cases. With 17% of the population on these antidepressant medications, I mean, this could have happened to you, to your sister, to your daughter, to your friend.

Rich Zeoli: Could it? Because, I mean, by saying that, you’re saying that you, in your professional opinion, you think the drugs were the cause of her killing her kids?

Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring: Well, based on what I’ve reviewed from the documentation around her medical malpractice case, what it boils down to is really: What are the alternative explanations?

And so when you look at something horrific like this–a mother killing her three children and throwing herself out the window–generally you think motive. Was the husband having an affair? Did she find out? Was this a revenge killing of the children and then a suicide?

But everyone is saying, no, this was someone who was a loving mother, no history of drug abuse, no history of abusing the children, cared deeply about her kids. And this is the thing that really makes it very compelling. The husband, who has the most reason to turn on her right now, is standing by her alongside her mother-in-law–the husband’s mother and father. They’re all supporting her, saying she was desperately trying to get help.

And the prosecution is trying to make it seem like she was a secret psychopath and she was feeling out of control, and that’s why it happened.

And so in a case like this where there’s no clear motive and the whole family is standing beside her, what are the alternative explanations? Well, you look at the medical records. And this isn’t someone just saying, “All the drugs made me do it.” You know, I know we can get really–people will do that when something happens. They’ll say, “Oh, it’s my mental illness,” or “The drugs made me do it.”

But in this case, we have a paper trail from multiple different doctors saying that she is deteriorating on these medications and they’re making her worse and worse. And so I do think there’s enough evidence there that she will be found not guilty by reason of insanity because the drugs induced a psychotic episode, because it really doesn’t make sense that she would do this.

Rich Zeoli: Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring is our guest here on the Guy Benson Show, a psychiatrist, co-founder of the Taper Clinic, which is a private practice, and they help people get off psychiatric drugs.

I guess an obvious question would be: If she’s on these drugs and they’re making her worse and she’s spiraling, why not just get her off the drugs? And I think the answer is because you can’t just cold turkey somebody. So I’m guessing–I don’t know–but I mean, was there ever any talk, as far as you know, of tapering her off these drugs, trying something else, and just getting her off all these psychotropics? Or do people that prescribe psychotropic drugs have a motivation in keeping their patients on psychotropic drugs?

Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring: So there were efforts. About 20 days before this happened, she was admitted to a hospital in Harvard, where the doctors there acknowledged her concerns that the drugs were making her worse. They took her off the Seroquel. They took her off the Valium. They did it too quickly, but they took her off.

And then she went back to outpatient care, and her doctor, Jennifer Tufts, despite her responding very poorly to multiple antidepressants previously, put her on amitriptyline. And the day before she took the lives of her kids, they doubled the dose.

So this wasn’t–the problem with this was it wasn’t a coordinated plan between the different doctors. And the reality of what this really looked like was these were Zoom visits, 20 minutes, pretty transactional care. They weren’t calling collateral. They weren’t talking to family members.

And that’s the other interesting thing about this case. It just wasn’t the type of care that anyone would have wanted for someone that they love–impersonal care over Zoom during a serious crisis like this. And it’s very common that that’s the kind of care that people are getting these days.

Rich Zeoli: I would think so, in our post-COVID world now. I mean, I see all the time advertisements for–you can get any drug nowadays by just going online, whether it’s Ozempic or whether it is Adderall or something else, and you just do a consultation on video, usually with an RN. I mean, I’m not trying to disparage RNs, but it’s not with a psychiatrist in most cases, and then you get your prescription in the mail.

It’s–I think we’re playing with fire with this, and I’ve always questioned, you know, when we have these school shootings and everything else, are these kids being overprescribed? Or what kind of drugs are they on? What are their interactions?

We don’t–I don’t think we’re talking enough as a country, as a society, about all these different drugs and what they can do and all these combinations, and the fact that somebody could be on these drugs getting them by mail.

So the other question I have for you, doctor, is this: If I go to CVS and I fill a prescription, or my doctor calls it in for an antibiotic or something, and then he sends another drug in, they can see if there’s an interaction. But if I’m going online to some psychiatric clinic and I’m getting drugs mailed to me, and I go to another one and I get more drugs mailed to me, there’s no way to check if there is an interaction, right?

Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring: No, there’s not. You know, and people–that’s a problem, I think. No, it’s a big problem.

And you think, well, maybe the pharmacist will pick up the ball, because if you’re going into a pharmacy, most of the time the pharmacists just kind of shove this thing towards you. It looks like it’s a credit card thing, but it says, “You would give–please acknowledge you were given an opportunity to talk to the pharmacist about your medications.”

Most people don’t even look at that. They just say yes, and they get the drugs. And no one’s really looking at everything because it’s time-consuming and they don’t need to. There’s no standard around informed consent in that way.

Rich Zeoli: So let’s talk about postpartum depression, doctor, if we could, and the idea of the psychosis aspect of this. How common is postpartum depression? There are some people on the internet who are alleging it’s not real, and they’re saying that this is one of those made-up kind of things. And then how common is the psychosis part of it? Or is the psychosis fueled by the drugs that are given to treat postpartum depression?

Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring: Okay, so postpartum depression is fairly common, and it’s made up of a few things. So there’s the baby blues. There’s definitely hormonal fluctuations in that postpartum period. And this is obvious to all of the listeners. Most of the women who have gone through this, and also the husbands who have supported their wives through this, will know that it is a more emotional time. And there’s definitely hormonal factors at play.

But this is also a psychological thing as well. Many families are dealing with the added finances of looking after the kid. Maybe the wives have stopped working as well. There’s just a whole reshuffling of how the household works. And so there’s that as well, and that’s incredibly common. Having a kid is a big stressor.

But when it comes to the psychosis that can occur in the absence of drugs, you don’t need to be on drugs or to be having adverse reactions for that. But that’s really like a one-in-a-thousand occurrence. It is quite uncommon to have postpartum psychosis.

Now, with respect to Lindsay Clancy, I don’t actually know if she was having postpartum psychosis independently of the drugs, because she went there because she was very depressed, and it was only after she started having the severe insomnia induced by the SSRI medication she was put on that she started to have homicidal thoughts and eventually command auditory hallucinations telling her to harm her kids.

Rich Zeoli: See, that’s exactly what I was thinking in all this, is that whether or not the postpartum depression–I just have a hard time believing that that’s what caused this. I blame the medication here. I mean, I do.

And when you’re looking at all these combinations, you’re looking at these cocktails, you look at all the side effects. I mean, trazodone, for example, is a great example. I assume they gave her trazodone to help her sleep, right?

Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring: Yes, they did.

Rich Zeoli: They gave that to me after I had heart surgery to help me sleep. And I had to stop it because I was having the same problem that you have with Viagra. So I had to give up on it, doctor. I understand that’s kind of common, even in a low dose.

But I mean, I was only on some of these drugs for a short period of time when I was recovering from major surgery, but they messed with my head. You know what I mean? And I just can’t imagine they’re just throwing the kitchen sink at somebody and then praying for the best.

So Lindsay Clancy, of course, accused of killing her three children, murdering her three. And she told her husband she was going to do this. So I guess that’s the other question: Somebody asked me once, they said, “If your wife said this to you, what would you think?” And people were like, “Well, you’d probably call the police or you’d call social services.”

I don’t know if I would, because maybe now I would because of this case, but before this, maybe I would think, “Oh, she’s just saying that. She doesn’t mean it. There’s no way she would ever do that.” It’s just, she’s tired. You know, I wouldn’t imagine her doing something like this, and I know her husband felt the same way.

Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring: Yeah, yeah, and I think that’s the right way to look at it, because she told her mom the same thing in December. And I think it’s just–it seems impossible, really.

I mean, if you were here, “I’m having these really scary thoughts.” “Okay, what are the thoughts?” “Well, in my thoughts, I feel like it would be better off if me and the kids weren’t here anymore.”

And you’d say, “Well, okay, that’s really dark and morbid.” And they say, “Well, you can keep an eye on me. Can you watch me closely, Mom? Can you come and stay here? Can we be together?”

You probably think, “Okay, well, at least she’s acknowledging it. We’re mitigating this risk. I’m going to be keeping an eye on her.”

Again, I think it’s things that kind of change. Now, after hearing this case, I think people will take this a lot more seriously. But I understand why the mom and the husband didn’t immediately call the police and commit her to the hospital, because it just–it would seem like something that would never happen.

Rich Zeoli: Right. You just–you can’t imagine it.

Last question for you, doctor. A lot of these drugs are old drugs. It seems like the treatment for a lot of depression and anxiety is still the pills that I joked about–“Mother’s Little Helper.” But that was a Rolling Stones song about Valium, you know, from the ’70s.

Are we making progress now with medications? I know they’re now trying psychedelics and ketamine and all these other things. But do the pharmaceutical companies just have such a grip on the industry that nothing’s really going to change?

Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring: You know, it’s pretty bleak right now, Rich, because the problem in all of this aren’t the drugs. Drugs are just tools. They’re chemicals that induce a drug effect, and it can be therapeutic for some people for a period of time.

But when we really look at mental health, the things that most people need is they need to improve their physical health. They need to lose some weight. They need to get moving. They need to clean up their diet. They need to have loving relationships, and they need to have things that they enjoy doing in their life.

And honestly, our primary medical services do not help people with those things. It’s set up for scalability. It’s set up for online care. And a scalable thing to do is not to understand your patients and the problems in their life. It’s essentially just to prescribe meds.

And it’s no wonder that we have nearly 20% of the population on these drugs now, and that we have a very small fraction of people who are having severe adverse reactions and ending up like Lindsay Clancy, doing things that they never would have done otherwise.

Rich Zeoli: Excellent. Doctor, I really appreciate your analysis on this. It’s a scary time and, you know, hopefully we will get back to doctors that actually sit down with their patients and care about their patients and don’t think the answer is always in a bottle, in a pill.

Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring, thank you, doctor. And please visit TaperClinic.com, especially if you’re thinking about tapering off some of these psychiatric medications the right way.

Thanks, Doc.

Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring: Thank you, Rich. Take care. Bye-bye.