RadixJournal - September 23, 2026


Patrick Clancy’s Intrusive Thoughts

Hosted by
Richard Spencer
Mentioned
Lindsay Clancy Patrick Clancy Dead Reckoning Cora
Aronofsky’s Black Swan

Episode Stats


Length

15 minutes

Words per minute

124.1

Word count

1,887

Sentence count

65

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

8

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 What kind of mother was she?
00:00:01.860 She was very hands-on.
00:00:04.040 And I think she reached that point that she sort of dreamed of.
00:00:13.980 She's a hands-on mother?
00:00:16.880 As opposed to what?
00:00:22.540 I mean, I don't know.
00:00:24.800 like a a baroness who has her underlings raise her children i mean it seems like living in america
00:00:36.980 in the 20th 21st century mothers are all hands-on it's just sort of an odd thing to say
00:00:44.680 i've noticed this i haven't watched this entire thing i'm looking forward to it but
00:00:51.200 But a lot of these questions arise when I listen to Patrick Clancy.
00:00:57.960 It's like he's implying something else.
00:01:02.140 And Callan, your youngest, was born in May of 2022?
00:01:07.260 May 26th.
00:01:08.460 May 26th, 2022.
00:01:10.560 How soon afterwards did you realize that something was wrong with your wife?
00:01:14.780 Probably about five months.
00:01:16.160 and so yeah it was it was October and she went a few nights without sleeping what did she tell you
00:01:25.400 that she was experiencing that she came downstairs one morning and she said I didn't sleep at all
00:01:31.600 last night and so I said you know that's awful and I'll I'll take the kids to school you just focus
00:01:38.920 on getting caught up on sleep.
00:01:42.740 And what happened from there?
00:01:44.400 Like, how did it get worse?
00:01:47.240 Well, she went another night without sleeping.
00:01:50.100 So she went to the hospital after that.
00:01:53.520 And they tried to give her some medications to help with that.
00:01:57.500 But it was a bit of a spiral for the next month, month and a half.
00:02:02.780 What did she tell you she was experiencing?
00:02:05.940 Severe depression, a lot of anxiety.
00:02:08.920 and the sleep didn't improve much she improved a little bit but
00:02:13.300 she was still struggling to get sufficient sleep each night and so it was
00:02:19.460 this is every mother who has had a child i mean
00:02:28.200 he said there so there are two nights without sleeping due to anxiety okay
00:02:34.560 um then she was struggling to get sufficient sleep i mean i think most mothers would tell you that
00:02:42.920 for a year they don't get sufficient sleep
00:02:47.520 it's just this guy seems to be patrick seems to be just the ultimate wife guy he's focusing on her
00:02:57.360 and her well-being as opposed to the children's 0.63
00:03:04.560 And I hate to say it, but I'm not being callous or like, you know, women, you know, get back to the kitchen, go take care of the kids. I'm not being like that at all. I'm just saying that the reality of being a middle class or working class person raising children is that it's really hands on. 1.00
00:03:26.680 And the child, particularly for the first year,
00:03:29.820 just needs attention constantly.
00:03:32.940 And no mother is getting sufficient sleep.
00:03:38.340 Now, could this situation be improved?
00:03:41.620 Should dads do more?
00:03:44.140 Yes.
00:03:45.000 Now, there's a limit to what dads can even do
00:03:47.640 because the child is so attached to his mother. 1.00
00:03:49.980 And there's obviously breastfeeding involved
00:03:52.400 and all that kind of stuff.
00:03:53.220 But just this, he just seems to be this wife guy of just really, really concerned about whether his Lindsay is at tip top shape ready to go.
00:04:09.780 And I just find this very odd and I don't quite know what to make of it other than he's a pushover.
00:04:18.020 I mean, he is a very successful man, so he must be ambitious and hard-nosed when it comes to his job.
00:04:32.260 He's a salesman for Microsoft and is making great money.
00:04:37.620 But I don't know what to say about this guy.
00:04:41.040 It was just hard to catch up.
00:04:42.100 Did you know anything about postpartum mental illness before this experience started?
00:04:48.020 No. I could piece together what it was like to be really, really anxious or depressed.
00:04:55.040 But I didn't know how to manage a postpartum illness.
00:04:59.600 I think mental illness has this ability to be tragically deceptive.
00:05:04.540 So I'm sure there are things that I didn't see.
00:05:07.720 What kind of support were you?
00:05:10.140 Mental illness has the ability to be tragically deceptive?
00:05:14.780 i i feel like what he's imagining is mental illness is like a virus
00:05:23.940 you know and it's like with the virus is it a life form or is it not um many people say a virus is
00:05:31.140 not alive but a virus undergoes darwinian selection a virus is attempting to reproduce
00:05:39.880 all over the place. If a virus isn't alive, then what is alive? I would say. But it's almost like
00:05:48.400 mental illness has the agency. Mental illness has a life of its own. Mental illness is this virus
00:05:56.300 that jumps in your ear and enters your brain and makes you do things. And it's actually really
00:06:04.120 deceptive. In fact, it's like postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis are these
00:06:11.500 agentic entities, and they can enter your head. Much like evil AI in Mission Impossible
00:06:21.220 Final Reckoning, or whatever it was, Dead Reckoning, where the AI is so smart that it
00:06:30.180 can anticipate your moves so you you almost have to act randomly because the ai knows it's looked
00:06:36.680 through your facebook and so it knows exactly how you think about things it was exactly what
00:06:41.680 you're gonna do it knows exactly what you're gonna feel and so the mental illness can like
00:06:46.700 mask itself so this is why lindsay clancy seemed normal why she checked herself out of a hospital
00:06:57.940 maybe the mental illness told her to do that and why she took photos building a snowman with her
00:07:05.100 children it's why she calmly and collectively sent patrick clancy on an errand to go get
00:07:14.400 exquisite food from a restaurant for them to eat and also pick up something from walgreens for
00:07:23.580 their children it wasn't a way of getting them out of the house so she could do what she wants
00:07:29.660 to do it was the psychosis like masking itself do we know of a mental illness that mask itself
00:07:40.600 i hate this word mental illness i like personality profile does does schizophrenia mask itself
00:07:48.960 What would that even mean? No. Schizophrenia reveals itself. That's the problem. Maybe someone suffering from schizophrenia, particularly if he or she is getting treatment, could maybe mask it. But the disease does not mask itself.
00:08:07.800 the psychopath wears a mask every day of his life but it's not psychopathy that is some disease that
00:08:16.940 you catch for a period of time and it's able to mask itself what what are we talking like i'm i'm
00:08:23.440 i know i'm going on at length with this but i i really want to get at how he thinks of these
00:08:30.000 things and how a lot of regular people understand the psyche and it seems to be their worldview is
00:08:39.760 that people are great lindsey was just a fantastic mom but she just catches a mental illness
00:08:49.020 this ai evil ai mental illness that um prevents you it won't reveal itself and it makes you do 0.65
00:09:04.340 horrible things and so on so i uh i i just i just find this remarkable yeah both our parents were 0.75
00:09:11.260 trying to help as much as they could we had friends in town dropping off meals
00:09:15.160 Lindsay was pretty open about it you know people that's at the kids school were aware of it and
00:09:21.460 they're trying to be helpful so there was there was there were people who were trying to help us
00:09:27.160 out thinking about it now there was no way we were gonna win did it help I think so at the time yeah
00:09:41.560 Yeah, when you have that support, when you have people rooting for you, it can be helpful.
00:09:47.860 She had so much support.
00:09:49.100 Patrick and Lindsay Clancy were living.
00:09:51.360 She had a husband who's in the top, I would imagine, 5% to 4% income bracket.
00:10:02.500 She had intact extended family.
00:10:06.380 She had nannies, in fact, and daycare.
00:10:11.560 and she had mcclain uh mental health facility which is connected to harvard and is the best
00:10:19.980 in the world i i don't i mean she had so much more than 99 percent of mothers in america it's pretty
00:10:31.480 shocking in the seaside town of Duxbury Massachusetts they were married six
00:10:41.320 years months after the birth of their third child Lindsay made repeated
00:10:45.980 emergency room visits she admitted herself to a program for patients with
00:10:50.140 postpartum depression and was discharged after a day of treatment she
00:10:54.580 was also prescribed an escalating number of prescription drugs Patrick said he
00:10:59.620 struggled to help his wife navigate the medical system what was the low point a few months in
00:11:07.380 i think december december was a it was a big struggle for her uh just a huge lack of sleep
00:11:15.300 deep deep depression intrusive thoughts and um at the end of that month this is cbt just 0.82
00:11:23.540 bullshit speak therapy speak intrusive where is that thought coming from outside of your own 0.86
00:11:30.760 psyche i would ask you is a thought like a virus it's like an external entity do we actually 0.98
00:11:37.680 believe this the thought has agency it's it intrudes into your mind i am sorry to say but
00:11:46.340 But all of your outside, I don't know, like extreme drugging and things like that or psychological manipulation from another human being, perhaps a head injury, head injuries can change personality.
00:12:03.800 I will admit this. Outside of those things, those thoughts are yours. They're your thoughts.
00:12:10.420 you have to take responsibility for them even the crazy ones even the extreme sexual 0.59
00:12:20.060 thoughts even the ones the thoughts you have about killing that person you just can't stand
00:12:26.400 that's your thought it's not an intrusive thought 1.00
00:12:32.340 i i just hate the way we think about the psyche it's just such it's such self-serving bullshit 0.95
00:12:41.900 she went to the hospital it was new year's eve when lindsey checked herself into mclean's 0.93
00:12:51.920 psychiatric hospital she was treated for depression and days later she was released
00:12:57.040 The family celebrated Cora's birthday on January 7th.
00:13:01.840 She told you she wanted to come home.
00:13:04.060 She did.
00:13:05.400 17 days later, the unthinkable.
00:13:08.620 Okay, I mean, so Patrick Clancy and Lindsay Clancy have both filed civil lawsuits.
00:13:16.420 I would imagine they're seeking millions of dollars for wrongful death from the health care provider, McLean.
00:13:24.940 And, I mean, I don't think he's helping his case by saying that the mental illness had a way of masking itself.
00:13:36.580 It seems to be harming his case.
00:13:39.500 But also, you get to this point where Lindsay checks herself out of these clinics under her own accord, and also Lindsay is not taking the medication provided for her.
00:13:53.180 so are you suing them because they should have like involuntarily committed lindsay i imagine
00:14:01.840 if they did that patrick clancy would be up in arms that this is the authoritarian healthcare
00:14:08.320 system run amok i just don't understand how she can't claim any responsibility for this
00:14:19.460 and patrick can't claim any responsibility for this 0.68
00:14:24.840 there's just like there's like a a viral agentic mental illness that got inside her head
00:14:34.300 and the hospital didn't treat this self-actualizing willful mental illness correctly
00:14:42.880 and thus owes patrick and lindsey millions of dollars i i just find the like basic assumptions
00:14:54.380 of in this case and like the worldview expressed by these people to be just
00:15:00.780 horrendous anathema to what i would propose
00:15:07.200 and and how i think we should understand the human psyche