This story discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
“Duck Dynasty” stars weighed in on a recent court case that captivated America.
During an episode of their podcast, “Unashamed with the Robertson Family,” Jase Robertson, Al Robertson and Zach Dasher discussed the Lindsay Clancy case and how it has sparked what they called a “bigger conversation” surrounding “mental health in America.”
“I would love to see that conversation emerge because I do think that we have pathologized, and by pathologized, I mean we’ve turned a lot of spiritual issues into diseases,” Dasher said. “We call them like pathologies.”
Dasher argued that psychiatric conditions cannot always be measured through laboratory tests, noting, “you can’t measure depression with a microscope,” and saying that “they don’t even know how these antidepressants” and “antipsychotics” work.
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Dasher said there is “a biblical answer here” and that a “big discussion” needs to be had.
Clancy recently went on trial on three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her three children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months old. She admitted that she strangled the children before attempting suicide, including by jumping from a second-story window, leaving her paralyzed from the sternum down.
During her trial, which ended in a mistrial after jurors could not reach a unanimous verdict, the defense argued that she should be found not guilty by reason of insanity because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis when she killed the children. Her lawyers also argued that she had been overmedicated while seeking psychiatric treatment.
“I think Granny had a real issue, a lithium deficiency when she was treated with lithium. All of her psychosis subsided,” Dasher said, referring to the mother of late family patriarch Phil Robertson. “But man, how many people were just throwing these pills at people?”
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Dasher added that the current mental health system is “not working.”
“I think that anybody that is capable of murdering your children… Anyone that does that is obviously in a very sick spiritual state,” Dasher said. “There’s something going on here that we can’t just turn everything into a pathology. Into a disease. Into something that could be treated with a pill.”
Dasher maintained, however, that he believes Clancy “should be held accountable and put in a facility,” adding that he “does have sympathy in my heart” for her.
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Jase agreed with Dasher, saying “some justice has to be there” for the three children, and that “if you kill your three kids, you need to be locked up for the rest of your life.”
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“Two things can be true at the same time. And one is, if somebody murders her children, you have to put that person away,” Dasher said. “I mean, they have to. There has to be accountability in that.”
He continued: “And yeah, antidepressants are overprescribed. Antipsychotics are probably overprescribed. And so I think both of these things are true at the same time. But I think it’s another form of pathologizing what happened to say, ‘Well, the drugs made her do it.’”
