Louise Barnett on Lindsay Clancy and the Insanity Defense: “I Don’t Think Postpartum Psychosis Should Be Treated as Some Kind of Legal Loophole”

Louise Barnett was 32 years old, standing at an overpass above the Dallas North Tollway with her toddler daughter at her side, when her memoir began. Not long after, she was hospitalized and received a diagnosis of Bipolar I.

From outward appearances, Louise seemed to be a top performer at a Fortune 100 company sharp, polished, accomplished, and, by every objective standard, an absolute success.

But today, Louise is 43 years old, and she is sharing that journey in Tainted Love: A Bipolar Memoir, coming October 6 during Depression Awareness Month. Her memoir, a mix of love story and mental-health memoir, takes readers through her experience of Bipolar I, addiction, motherhood, and relationships before finding sobriety and a new path toward recovery. Today she advocates for mental health awareness, produces and hosts the I’m Bipolar. Now What? podcast and has amassed an audience of over 100,000 across social media.

Tainted Love arrives during the highly publicized trial of Lindsay Clancy, who had postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder, and whose actions led to her infant son’s death. Jury deliberations in the case have lasted since August 27, with the jury having twice reported its inability to agree on a verdict, leading Judge William Sullivan to read the Tuey Rodriguez dynamite charge. If this happens a third time, a mistrial will follow.

Speaking exclusively to Where Is The Buzz, Louise Barnett said she does not mean to make a diagnosis of Clancy or to comment on the question of her guilt or innocence. She can, however, talk about the experience of severe mental illness from a mother’s perspective, the warning signs that are only recognizable in hindsight, and the deceptiveness of appearances.

When Where Is The Buzz asked about her state of mind during the infamous walk along the overpass and how much of that day she recalls firsthand versus what she reconstructs from records or others, Barnett insisted the book tells her story from her own memory.

“By the time I reached the crossroads at the Dallas North Tollway and Mockingbird Lane, I couldn’t do it anymore. Everything was too hard. I had just come off a three-month manic high, the highest I had ever been, and as a result, I had been thrown into the trenches of the lowest of lows,” she said. “My life had become one of extreme detachment from everything, including motherhood. Feeding my daughter, bathing her, taking her to daycare, putting her to bed. I was just going through the motions. I had previously felt the love a mother should feel in those moments, but in that depression, I became completely detached from it.”

Alongside the detachment, Louise suffered from the problem of drinking that was linked to something she was unable to name at the time.

“I was also using alcohol to medicate something I didn’t have a name for yet. Life became an endless cycle from sunrise to sunset, just waiting until I could drown myself in my sorrows and do it all over again the next day. Weekends were harder because there were so many more hours to fill and nobody there to help me,” she said.

When asked whether someone in such a state could reconstruct their experience accurately afterward, Louise was very clear about her recollections.

“What I describe about that day in the book comes from my own memory. I didn’t have to reconstruct it from records or from other people. I remember the sounds, the smells, the lights, the Texas heat. I remember the gravel crumbling beneath my feet. And I remember her crying,” she said.

As for the walk itself, Louise pointed out that it was routine, while what happened at the end was not.

“We took that walk every weekend, sometimes multiple times a weekend, so it wasn’t the first time I had experienced those thoughts. But it was the closest I had ever taken myself to the edge. And I remember what happened afterward just as vividly,” she said. “After what I describe in the book as the love of my life saving my life, I ran back to my apartment with the stroller and finally asked for help. I made a phone call I desperately did not want to make to my mother in Africa and told her how troubled I was and that I physically felt like I could not survive any longer. I also have a history with anorexia, and at that point I weighed 84 pounds. I was so terribly weak. I vividly remember sitting on my balcony afterward, bawling my eyes out, because I finally knew one thing with absolute certainty: I could not do this anymore. I could not do it alone.”

The idea of being “high-functioning” is frequently used to counter the argument that a person with such a mental state cannot be so sick. Louise explained that the argument catches only the part of her life she let others see.

“Bipolar disorder, on average, can take years to accurately diagnose; for me, fifteen, and there are many reasons for that. But one of the reasons for me was that a lot of the symptoms of mania actually looked like success,” she said. “I graduated college cum laude. I went on to get an MBA, also cum laude, that I completed in less than two years. Out of my MBA, I started a business that was profitable within the first year. And I was very successful in my career. I was able to work incredibly hard, around the clock. I could come up with innovative and creative ideas and immediately act on them. From the outside, those behaviors weren’t necessarily viewed as red flags. Quite frankly, they were viewed as success.”

That blindness was not exclusive to others. Louise explained that she was blind to the red flags from the inside, too.

“Internally, I didn’t see the red flags either because this was my reality. I didn’t know anything different. I was never able to zoom out and see the whole picture. Yes, I was experiencing devastating lows, but I thought that was what everybody experienced, or that it was simply part of who I was. I never put the pieces together and recognized the pattern of these extreme highs followed by these extreme lows,” she said.

When asked what the cost of performance was, Louise described a list of decisions that did not make her résumé.

“And what did it cost me? Ultimately, the highs became too high, and the lows became too low. On paper, my life looked good. It looked successful. But that wasn’t the whole story. Alongside the kind of mania that could look like ambition and achievement, I was also making incredibly impulsive decisions. I got pregnant as a result of a manic love affair. Later, I snuck across the country with a convicted felon and my baby as a result of another manic love affair. Behind the curtain, things were not going well,” she said.

Hiding it from the outside world became an art form for Louise, and she had some advantage in doing so thanks to the nature of her family.

“I was also very good at controlling what the outside world was allowed to see. I didn’t want anyone to see the lows or the darkness beneath the mask. I have a global family, so choices or behaviors that might have raised questions were relatively easy to keep private. I call it the ‘under-the-rug syndrome’: you show off the good, you hide the bad, and you share just enough to keep curious minds at bay,” she said. “So to someone who says I couldn’t have been that sick because I was ‘high-functioning,’ I would say they were only seeing the part of my life I allowed them to see. Yes, I was performing. Yes, I was achieving. But behind the curtain, I was living my life treading water.”

One thing Louise emphasizes throughout her stories is that families often recognize warning signs only in retrospect. When asked whether anyone around her could have done something, or whether she was placing an unfair burden on a family that couldn’t, Louise refused to shift the blame.

“I’ve been thinking about dying since 1999, when my mind turned against me for the first time. It was like a switch flipped. Almost overnight, I went from being an innocent, naive, fun-loving teenager to somebody in such a catastrophic depression that I couldn’t function. I turned to self-harm and anorexia, and I spent weeks crying uncontrollably alone in my room. I documented so much of this in journals, some of which I include in the book, and I think they show just how painful and sudden bipolar depression can be,” she said.

Her parents did something about it. All they did was react to what they saw in front of them.

“My parents absolutely knew something was wrong, and they put me into therapy. But this is where the hindsight question becomes really important: I was presenting with depression and anxiety. I was not presenting with an obvious case of bipolar disorder. So that is what was treated, including with SSRIs like Zoloft, which ultimately were ineffective for me,” she explained.

This difference, the ability to see that there is something wrong versus to see the specifics, influences Louise’s approach to the issue of responsibility.

“So yes, there were warning signs that something was wrong. But I don’t think it’s fair to say my parents had the information or knowledge necessary to identify those signs as bipolar disorder. They weren’t equipped to do that. Generationally and culturally, mental health was also not a conversation they had grown up having. My parents are from Zimbabwe, and this simply wasn’t part of their world,” she said.

Other signs came later, but they were explainable in another way.

“As I got older, other signs emerged. Reckless behavior, drug and alcohol use, impulsivity. But by then, I had adopted this identity of being the ‘black sheep’ or the rebellious middle child. Those behaviors could easily be explained as youth in revolt rather than symptoms of an undiagnosed mental illness,” she said.

The first one to mention the possibility of a bipolar disorder out loud was Louise’s older sister in 2012, when Louise was pregnant by someone whom she had known for less than two months during her manic love affair.

“I remember my sister asking me, ‘Have you ever given any thought to bipolar?’ I dismissed it. I think a lot of people would. And my family was dispersed around the world. My sister wasn’t someone who saw me every day or even regularly enough to observe the entire pattern,” she said.

Three years later, in a hospital bed, she was mentioned again. This time, the one who mentioned the possibility of bipolar was able to see the whole picture in front of her.

“The next time bipolar was seriously put in front of me was in the inpatient unit following the crossroads at Mockingbird Lane. That was ultimately the difference. My doctor was able to take a bird’s-eye view and zoom out completely. Instead of looking at each depression or each high as an isolated experience, which is what I had been doing and what had largely been treated throughout my life, she looked at the entire pattern. That was how I finally received my Bipolar I diagnosis,” she said of her hospitalization in 2015.

This is why Louise is careful to criticize families for not noticing the disorder.

“So I’m very careful about putting responsibility on families to recognize bipolar disorder. Looking backward, I can draw a straight line through so many of these experiences. But the line wasn’t straight when we were living it. My family knew I was struggling. Recognizing that those struggles were pieces of a much larger bipolar picture was an entirely different thing,” she said.

Most of the testimony in the Lindsay Clancy case has been revolving around the subject of psychiatric care and the number of medications and providers in her case over a period of several months. When asked whether the issue is less about the illness and more about poor handling of treatment, Louise said it was both, starting with herself.

“When I first received my bipolar diagnosis, it wasn’t something I wanted to accept, and so I very haphazardly accepted it. I was not fully compliant with my medication. I was not honest in therapy. I was absolutely abusing alcohol. I have to take ownership of that piece of my recovery,” she said.

Finding the right medication was separate from acceptance and a process in itself.

“Part of any new bipolar diagnosis is also finding the right medication. I was very fortunate that once I received the diagnosis in the inpatient unit, my doctor put me on lithium, and I responded very well to it initially. After leaving the hospital, however, we struggled to find supplemental medications that I responded well to for the continuing depression and anxiety. That was an incredibly painful process. We just kept trying and trying. But again, I have to acknowledge that I was also drinking and wasn’t being honest about everything that was going on. There is a degree to which the patient must take responsibility for their treatment, too,” she noted.

Another problem Louise described is one she had noticed over time during various moves and changes in her care providers.

“One thing I’ve noticed in the years since my diagnosis, especially because we’ve moved around, is how little communication there can be between providers. Yes, you can sign release forms, but you can tell one story to one provider and a completely different version of that story to another, and the outcome can change dramatically. I do think there is an opportunity for much better communication and handoff between providers, particularly when someone is seeing multiple people or their medications are changing rapidly,” she said.

Still, Louise placed the turning point in her recovery not in a certain medication, but in sobriety.

“For me, though, recovery simply could not happen until I got sober. I was diagnosed in 2015, and for years afterward I continued to struggle with accepting my bipolar disorder. I experienced additional depressions and manias, including several catastrophic events, even after I had the diagnosis,” she said.

The difference-maker, she believed, was acceptance by someone else before she could accept herself.

“Things began to change when a loved one, my now-husband, was the first person to tell me that they loved me, bipolar or not, and wanted to embrace me for everything I was. Having that acceptance opened the door to accepting myself,” she said. “A couple of years later, after about a year of really struggling to stop drinking, I finally got sober on May 16th, 2021. That’s when I like to say the floodgates opened. I could finally focus on recovery and stability. I could be honest in therapy. I could be compliant with medication. I could actually see what my moods were doing without alcohol constantly complicating the picture.”

Sobriety did not cure her, and she knows that is important to highlight.

“But one of the most important things I share about my story is that bipolar disorder stays with us for our whole lives, and sometimes you can be doing everything ‘right’ and still get sick. In 2024, I was sober. I was going to therapy. I was honest. I was taking my medication. I was working on nervous system regulation, doing neurofeedback. You name it, I was doing all the things. And I still slipped into a devastating depression that lasted eight months. We had to add another medication, and then I had to have a tremendous amount of patience while we went through that process. It was a stark reminder that managing bipolar disorder is not something you figure out once and then move on from. Now I’m 43 and entering perimenopause, and hormones have introduced an entirely new variable into how my mood disorder behaves,” she said.

Asked which of the two options to choose- blaming the illness or the system- she refused to go with either one.

“So is this ultimately a story about individual illness or a treatment system that handles complex psychiatric illness badly? I think there are pieces of both. I can only speak to my own experience, but I believe the individual has a tremendous responsibility to participate honestly in their treatment. At the same time, we are asking people who can be profoundly unwell to navigate multiple providers, medications, diagnoses, and transitions in care, often without enough coordination between the people treating them. That is a huge part of the work and advocacy I do now: empowering people living with bipolar disorder to understand their own patterns, track their moods, recognize when something is changing, and advocate for themselves,” she said.

The question of where the dividing line goes between explaining the behavior and excusing it, and whether the severe mental illness absolves someone from responsibility or only makes it smaller, is the toughest question about her own material.

“I can’t change my past, but I can change what I do with it. I have to look at my past with compassion without abandoning accountability. My diagnosis gave me context for my choices, but it did not erase my responsibility for them,” she said.

It took her years to come to that stance, and the first step was asking that harmful question.

“For much of my life, I believed there was something fundamentally wrong with me,” Barnett said. “I was always on the outside looking in. I searched for answers through love, achievement, work, alcohol, and constantly becoming the next version of myself. I thought if I could find the right person, achieve enough, or finally become better, I might feel whole. If I could somehow erase parts of my past, maybe I would feel whole. Receiving a Bipolar I diagnosis gave me language for my experience, but even a diagnosis didn’t immediately answer the question of who I was. I spent years wondering: Where do I end and where does Bipolar I begin? Were all these choices mine, or were they symptoms?”

Eventually, she stopped chasing that answer and started to ask a different question.

“Eventually, I realized that perhaps that wasn’t the most useful question. The deeper shift for me was moving away from judgment and toward curiosity. Instead of asking, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ I started asking, ‘What do I need right now?’ Sometimes the answer is my psychiatrist, a medication change, or therapy. Sometimes it’s rest, movement, connection, fewer commitments, or simply permission to have a difficult day,” she said.

However, she is aware that self-reflection cannot end with self-compassion, especially in cases of psychosis.

“But when we’re talking about severe mental illness and moral responsibility, I think we also have to acknowledge something uncomfortable: there are states of mental illness in which a person’s perception of reality can become profoundly impaired. Psychosis, by definition, can alter a person’s ability to understand what is real. I don’t think acknowledging that is the same thing as saying that every action committed during mental illness should automatically be excused. Those are two very different statements,” she said.

When asked about those people who saw “postpartum psychosis” as a loophole in the legal system, she clarified that it is not.

“I don’t think ‘postpartum psychosis’ should be treated as some kind of legal loophole. It is a serious psychiatric condition, and whether it affected a particular person’s legal responsibility is a question that has to be examined individually, based on the facts, the medical evidence, and the law. I’m not qualified to make that determination for another person,” she said.

She went back to the only case she can judge: her own life.

“What I can speak to is my own life,” Barnett says. “Understanding my bipolar disorder allowed me to have compassion for myself without pretending the consequences of my choices disappeared. I can acknowledge that mania influenced relationships, addiction, impulsivity, and decisions I deeply regret while still taking responsibility for the harm those choices caused.”

This accounting eventually brought her where she strove to for decades in vain.

“Once I stripped away all the noise, I eventually reached a realization that was incredibly simple but took me decades to believe: I am enough without having to earn it. I am enough despite my past. The goal was never to separate myself from Bipolar I, pretend it isn’t part of me, or pretend the past doesn’t exist. It is woven into my life, but it does not have to determine my worth,” she said.

Shame, she said, is what she tried to lay down, and this is the only reason why she wrote the book.

“That is really why I wrote Tainted Love. For so many years, I carried tremendous shame around the choices I made, the relationships I had, and the things I experienced before I understood my bipolar disorder. Instead of drowning in that shame, I can use what I’ve learned to help someone else feel seen, heard, and less alone, and maybe suffer a little bit less than I did. I really believe our stories can become survival guides for one another,” she said.

Barnett argues that high-profile cases increase stigma. Advocates, including herself, may make postpartum psychosis look like a more common and more dangerous disease and thus discourage women from disclosing their intrusive thoughts to their doctors. This is an issue she holds close to her heart. Postpartum psychosis affects 1 to 2 women per 1000 births, and it is rarely violent.

“In the advocacy work that I do, I love to find the gray area. In this instance, finding the gray area is devastating, because it’s hard to find an answer that keeps both mom and baby safe. High-profile cases like Clancy’s can deepen stigma precisely because they exist at the extremes. They don’t necessarily offer a look at everything that exists in between, and as a result, representation for that enormous gray area isn’t served,” she said.

The problem is that nobody tells moms where that gray line goes.

“And where is the line? Is it black and white that an intrusive thought about wanting to die or hurt someone else needs to be disclosed? What about ‘just’ self-harm? What about the mother who is meeting her child’s most basic human needs but feels completely detached from motherhood and incredibly far from the mother she wanted to be? What does she disclose? And what does she fear will happen if she does?” she asked.

There are two fears, and both of them prevent the disclosure.

“I absolutely worry about the mirror risk because the outcome of these conversations could very well determine whether women feel safe enough to disclose what they are actually experiencing. Women are already so accustomed to having our feelings, emotions, experiences, pain, and hormones dismissed. The more times we have doors slammed in our faces, the less likely we are to keep knocking. But there is another fear on the opposite side: What happens if I tell them everything? Will they think I’m dangerous? Will they take my baby away? Will they understand the difference between an intrusive thought and an intention to act?” she said.

She knows this fear personally, from the experience of the woman who held her baby in her hands while being interrogated by the police 13 years ago.

“I know that fear personally. Thirteen years ago, while I clutched my baby, I lied to the police about hurting myself. I lied about my intention to hurt myself. I lied about wanting to die. I was terrified of what would happen if I told the truth. Thirteen years later, I’m still not sure I want to know what would have happened if I had been completely honest,” she said.

Her solution isn’t to stop talking about extreme cases, but to change the process after disclosure.

“So yes, I worry about it deeply. We need to be able to talk about the most devastating outcomes of severe mental illness without allowing those outcomes to become the face of the illness itself. And we need to create a system where women can tell the truth about frightening thoughts and experiences without automatically believing that disclosure will be interpreted as dangerousness. Because if our message is simply ‘tell someone,’ but women are terrified of what happens after they tell, we haven’t solved the problem,” she said.

The daughter who was on the overpass is old enough to read about it. When asked how she deals with her daughter’s consent and how it is for her family to make the worst moment of her illness a public story, Barnett said that the book is waiting for her until she turns 18.

“Lily is 13 now, and she has asked to read her copy of Tainted Love when she turns 18. Thirteen is not an age at which I would recommend this book, even to my own daughter. Her copy is wrapped in a time capsule with a letter from Mom, waiting for her when she is ready,” she said.

In the meantime, she discusses the issue in her family.

“Today, Lily is growing up in a home with the understanding that mental illness is something families can talk about openly rather than hide. We also talk about the dialectic of our past. We can hold shame and guilt around our experiences while also taking accountability and responsibility for them. Both things can be true at the same time,” she said.

Moreover, she denies that the publication of the book made her illness’ worst moments become public.

“I have never once viewed Tainted Love as the worst moments of my illness becoming public material. Once I started writing, I felt an overwhelming sense of obligation to myself to process trauma in a way I never had in 30 years of therapy, and then an obligation to share it in an effort to create survival guides from our collective stories,” she said. “Through writing, I discovered a deeper purpose, one shaped by everything that built me, broke me, and pieced me back together. In that realization, I stopped seeing ‘worst moments.’ Instead, I found what I hadn’t even known I was searching for: the simple truth that I am enough. And with it, a quiet, undeniable peace.”

Tainted Love will be published October 6th, while the jury decides whether Lindsay Clancy is criminally responsible for killing her three children. Asked whether she worries about shaping the audience’s view of the case through the publication, she said that the book’s release date was predetermined long before the trial.

“Tainted Love has been years in the making, and its publication date was set long before I engaged in conversations surrounding the Lindsay Clancy case. I did not write this book in response to her case, and I certainly did not choose when her trial would take place,” she said. “I have always chosen to participate in a broader conversation about severe mental illness because I have lived experience that I believe has value in that conversation. I’ve been speaking publicly about bipolar disorder, suicide, addiction, motherhood, stigma, and psychiatric treatment long before this trial began, and I will continue speaking about them long after it ends.”

When asked about Patrick Clancy, who lost three children and who publicly asked people to show compassion to his wife, she refused to address him.

“I would never presume to know what to say to a father who has experienced an unimaginable loss of that magnitude. He has publicly asked for compassion toward his wife, and I think his words deserve to stand on their own,” she said. “My heart is with an entire family living through something most of us cannot begin to comprehend. I don’t need to insert myself into their grief to advocate for better understanding of severe mental illness.”

Tainted Love: A Bipolar Memoir will be published on October 6th.