Dr. Leclercq

Dr. Leclercq is the Belgian psychiatrist who treated Alice Espanet throughout the year before her trial and testified that she had suffered postpartum psychosis. His lengthy appearance gives the court a clinical framework for distinguishing ordinary post-birth distress from severe illness, while his account of stigma and Alice’s reported experience connects that framework to the question of her criminal responsibility.

Identity and Professional Background

Dr. Leclercq is described as an older Belgian physician, with grey hair and an accumulation of titles and honors. He had lived in Barcelona for years, and his sessions with Alice had taken place in French. The account presents him as respectable and established, but also identifies the basis of his relevance: he had treated Alice over the course of a year and had conducted pioneering research on postpartum depression and psychosis in Belgium in the late 1970s.

At the trial, his was one of the longest testimonies. At the request of Carmela Basaguren, he delivered an extended explanation of postpartum mental illness to the people in the courtroom. His role therefore exceeds that of a doctor offering a brief opinion about one patient. He supplies the medical distinctions through which the jurors and other listeners are asked to interpret Alice’s conduct, while his treatment history gives him a direct, continuing relationship to her case.

His Account of Postpartum Illness

Dr. Leclercq begins with baby blues, which he says affect 80 percent of mothers in the puerperal period but are not considered pathological. He attributes them to the hormonal imbalance immediately after childbirth, intensified by exhaustion and lack of sleep. Sadness, unexplained crying, anxiety, guilt, and the feeling that motherhood is overwhelming can occur in this phase; in the usual course, he explains, they recede within a few weeks as the mother regains a measure of equilibrium.

Duration and worsening symptoms mark the point at which his account shifts from transient distress to a condition requiring medical attention. If the difficulties persist or intensify after two or three months, he says, assessment should include the mother’s history and psychosocial circumstances, alongside tests to rule out physical causes. He describes postpartum depression as a serious illness that may require both psychiatric medication and psychotherapy, and from which recovery can take years. In some cases, he warns, depression can develop into postpartum psychosis, with a real risk that the mother may harm herself or the baby. Such cases, in his account, commonly call for immediate hospitalization and round-the-clock care.

Stigma and the Failure to Seek Help

When the defense asks why Alice had not consulted a doctor, Dr. Leclercq answers by placing her silence in a broader social pattern. He cites research in the United States and Europe suggesting that only about 15 percent of mothers experiencing postpartum depression sought help. He calls the illness a continuing taboo and explains that social pressure can make it difficult for women to admit—to themselves, their families, or medical authorities—that motherhood has not made them happy and has instead left them feeling devastated.

This argument does not establish why Alice personally failed to seek care. Rather, it challenges the assumption that not consulting a doctor is evidence against the seriousness of her condition. Dr. Leclercq’s explanation makes the difficulty of disclosure part of the testimony: the ideal of maternal happiness can discourage a mother from naming distress precisely when she may need assistance. In the trial’s context, his account of that silence offers a social explanation without claiming that every mother’s experience, or Alice’s in particular, follows the same course.

Diagnosis and the Distinction Between Impulses

Dr. Leclercq is careful to say that the progression from depression to psychosis is not direct or inevitable. Nevertheless, he considers Alice’s case clear and confirms that he is convinced she suffered psychosis. His explanation turns on the difference between an impulse that conflicts with a person’s values and one experienced as consistent with what must be done.

A mother with postpartum depression may think about hurting her baby, he explains, while experiencing the thought as repugnant and responding with guilt and shame. He calls such an impulse egodystonic: it clashes with the person’s way of thinking. In psychosis, by contrast, a thought of harming the baby may not trouble the patient; it may feel like the action that has to be taken. He calls that experience egosyntonic and says that, in an acute phase, the impulse may be carried out. His distinction provides the courtroom with a way to discuss not only what Alice did, but the relation between her thoughts and her grasp of reality at the time.

Alice’s Case and Narrative Function

Asked what supports his conclusion that Alice was in an acute phase of postpartum psychosis, Dr. Leclercq points to the account she gave: she felt the impulse and, instead of resisting it, yielded to it. His diagnosis thus rests in this exchange on his reading of her reported experience, interpreted through the clinical distinction he has just explained. He does not describe the movement from depression to psychosis as automatic; he presents Alice’s case as a particular one that, in his judgment, fits the latter condition.

His testimony also gives the trial a vocabulary for considering the limits of outward evidence. Earlier, the two psychiatrists who initially treated Alice at Hospital de Santiago confirmed that she had been in shock and had shown symptoms including disorientation, amnesia, and denial of reality during her admission. Dr. Leclercq’s longer account adds a different kind of evidence: a year of treatment, a diagnosis, and an explanation of how an acute psychotic state may alter the meaning of an impulse. Together, the testimony makes clinical interpretation central to the trial’s account of Alice, while leaving the legal judgment to the court.