Kelly Joy, MD

So I have a genuine question: What would you say to the priest who is standing beside Lindsay and her family through this tragedy? Would you direct the same outrage toward him? Call him disgusting? Accuse him of supporting what happened? Tell him that showing Lindsay compassion somehow dishonors her children? Because fundamentally, how is his compassion different from mine? He is offering mercy to a human being in the aftermath of an unimaginable tragedy. So am I. Neither of us is saying the children don’t matter. Neither of us is saying what happened wasn’t horrific. Neither of us is suggesting compassion erases accountability or consequences. We are simply refusing to believe that a human being becomes undeserving of compassion because something terrible happened during a profound mental-health crisis. If you can understand why a priest would sit beside someone at the absolute lowest and darkest point of her humanity, but you viciously attack another person for expressing that same mercy, perhaps it’s worth asking yourself why. Mercy isn’t meaningful when it’s reserved only for people who are easy to love.

Thank you to everyone unfollowing me. Truly. I have zero desire to be connected to people who refuse to grasp the reality that psychosis is real and can profoundly alter a person’s perception of reality, judgment, and behavior. I also have zero desire to debate people who lack the empathy to understand that someone in a psychotic state may not have the same capacity for rational thought, judgment, or self-control that they would have when well. And here’s the part people seem incapable of understanding: more than one truth can exist at the same time. You can grieve three innocent babies whose lives were tragically taken. You can believe those children deserved protection. You can advocate fiercely for accountability, proper mental-health intervention, and better safeguards for families in crisis. AND you can have compassion for a mother who was profoundly psychiatrically ill. What I refuse to participate in is the public burning of a mentally ill woman while acting as though everyone else around her existed in a vacuum. When a parent is experiencing a severe psychiatric crisis, the adults and systems surrounding that family have a responsibility to recognize the danger, intervene, and protect vulnerable children. So yes, I will continue talking about the failures surrounding this tragedy including questions about whether the father, healthcare providers, and support systems adequately recognized the severity of the situation and protected those children. Compassion for a mother experiencing psychosis does not diminish compassion for her children. Understanding mental illness does not mean excusing tragedy. And asking why the people and systems around a severely ill person failed to intervene does not mean blaming everyone except her. It means refusing to reduce an unimaginably complicated tragedy to “evil mother, end of story.” If that level of nuance and empathy makes you unfollow me, I am completely at peace with that.