Episode Details

The Lindsay Clancy case has generated strong opinions about psychiatric medication, postpartum psychosis, risk assessment and clinical responsibility.

It also gives us an opportunity to examine how we think about difficult cases.

We know the outcome. The clinicians making decisions at the time did not.

That distinction is easy to lose.

Once we know what happened, earlier events can appear more predictable than they actually were. Information that seemed insignificant can suddenly look important. Decisions that were reasonable at the time can look obviously wrong.

This is hindsight bias.

The case also raises difficult questions about causation. A medication may be associated with an event without causing it. A clinical decision can be followed by a tragic outcome without being responsible for that outcome.

None of this removes the need to examine what happened. It does mean we need to be careful about the conclusions we draw from it.

I discuss these issues in this episode, and why they are relevant to how we think about our children.

Because parenting involves the same problem. We make decisions with incomplete information. We interpret behaviour. We try to work out what is happening while we are still in the middle of it.

The ability to think clearly under those conditions is one of the things I explore in The Parent’s Mindset.

Get the ebook here:

https://www.huddlewisdom.com/the-parent-s-mindset-ebook