Speaking on “Fox News Live” with Aishah Hasnie on September 5, McGraw said Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, should not be forgotten amid the debate surrounding their mother’s mental state.
“[They] are the real folks we need to give our attention to here. Three innocent children did lose their lives, and you can never explain these situations away simply,” he said.
Clancy admitted to strangling her children in 2023, while her defense argued she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and was not in control of her actions.
McGraw said he is concerned when mental illness becomes a courtroom battle.
“[It’s] kind of a political, ideological football that’s used to try to skew something or is kind of debunked by another side rather than looking at what actually took place,” he said.
The jury deliberated for days before the judge declared a mistrial after the panel could not reach a unanimous decision.
McGraw urged that there will eventually be “accountability and Clancy’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 added.
While McGraw stressed he was not defending Clancy’s actions, he said the effects of psychosis should not be underestimated.
“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,” he detailed.
“I’m not excusing what she did in any way,” he said. “I think she should be held fully accountable, but I think we need to understand causation.”
McGraw also offered his assessment of how the two sides presented their cases to the jury.
The prosecution made a “pretty clunky presentation,” he said, although he believed prosecutors pulled things 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,” McGraw explained.
He said the defense’s explanation was “much more understandable and much more coherent than what the prosecution did.”
McGraw also raised concerns about the possibility of the case having 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.
A major point McGraw wanted to make was the difference between postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis.
“There’s a huge difference between postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis,” he said.
“Postpartum psychosis is a psychiatric emergency that requires immediate hospitalization,” McGraw continued. “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 situation a “psychiatric emergency that wasn’t treated as such.”
McGraw said the case can serve as a “teachable moment for the country,” but warned against turning Clancy into a “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?”