Lindsay Clancy was not just a criminal case. She was a cry for help we failed to hear.
Aashna Moitra, Opinion Writer
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I want help. I want to be well.”
Lindsay Clancy wrote those haunting words a few months before she killed her three children on January 24, 2023. The killings, an alleged result of postpartum psychosis, are preceded by disturbing journal entries documenting a woman struggling to keep functioning as a mother while her mental health deteriorated. She wrote that she was “completely overwhelmed, trying to take care of the three kids” and “drowning every day.” (Boston Globe)
On Nov. 18, 2022, she wrote:
I’m so desperate to get a mental break from taking care of everyone that my mind is trying to make something physically wrong with me.
The Washington Post
My mind never shuts off. It’s constantly thinking of the next thing someone needs.
Of her baby, she wrote: “I feel completely disconnected with my baby. I feel like I’m going through the motions every day.” She told her husband Patrick Clancy, “I want to die.” (CBS News)
This was not written after the fact but was a contemporaneous record of a woman describing an increasingly overwhelmed, exhausted and unwell mind.
She was asking for help. She was asking to be well. And yet she was still expected to be a mother.
That is where we need to begin.
There are no words that can adequately describe what happened in Duxbury, Mass. on Jan. 24, 2023.
Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children: five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old Callan, and then attempted to take her own life, cutting her wrists and throat before jumping from a second-story window. She survived. The fall left her paralyzed from the waist down. (AP News)
The deaths of the children can never be minimized but neither should the mental illness that preceded them. The Lindsay Clancy case forces us confront an uncomfortable reality about something that happens quietly and invisibly every day: Women who become mentally unwell after childbirth are expected to continue functioning as mothers, wives, workers and human beings at 100%.
Nearly four years, the six-week murder trial ended not with a verdict, but with a mistrial.
That fact should force us to pause and remember: postpartum mental illness is not a moral failure. It is an illness. This is perhaps the hardest lesson of Lindsay Clancy’s story.
Why Do We Treat the Brain Differently From Every Other Organ?
Clancy’s deterioration was not invisible in retrospect.
After the birth of her third child, Callan, in May 2022, Clancy’s mental health deteriorated dramatically. Within months she was experiencing escalating anxiety, insomnia, exhaustion, depression and panic attacks, followed by suicidal ideation, intrusive thoughts and, according to later court evidence, auditory hallucinations. (CT Insider). She sought help repeatedly and was treated by psychiatrists, nurse practitioners, therapists, emergency room physicians and a postpartum mental-health program.
Crucially, both her husband Patrick and her mother testified that Clancy disclosed thoughts of harming her children to them.
Yet on Jan. 23, the day before the killings, her psychiatrist testified that Clancy denied suicidal or homicidal thoughts and showed no obvious signs of psychosis.
This contradiction is devastating, but also illuminating.
Why is it so much easier for a person to say, “My chest hurts,” “My leg hurts,” “I have a migraine,” than “My brain is telling me that I might hurt myself or my children?”
If someone has a heart attack while driving and crashes a car, we understand instinctively that the event may have been beyond their control. If someone has a seizure, we do not accuse them of choosing to behave irrationally.
Yet if the brain malfunctions, we suddenly start talking about character, morality and choice.
That is the stigma, which can be and was deadly.
The Impossible Job of Being the “Good Mother”
One of the most haunting aspects of the Clancy case is the evidence that she desperately wanted to be a good mother. Her writings documented her preoccupation with her children’s wellbeing, her exhaustion, her deteriorating mental state and her determination to perform motherhood correctly. Even the family nanny later testified that, despite knowing Clancy was struggling with postpartum illness and seeing multiple doctors, she had never been concerned about Clancy’s interactions with the children and considered her a “wonderful Mom.”(CBS News)
Motherhood has become an endless performance of competence. The house must be clean. The children must be fed correctly. The lunches must be nutritious. The mother must recover beautifully, exercise, return to work, maintain a relationship, manage appointments, sleep when the baby sleeps and somehow remain grateful throughout.
And if she says she cannot?
There is always somebody waiting to remind her of her failures.
Social media has made this worse. Parenting groups that could be extraordinary sources of community can instead become arenas of comparison and moral superiority where mothers judge each other’s food (New York Post), routines, childcare choices, screen time, breastfeeding, sleep training and everything else. (Mott Poll Report)
Women desperately need a village, but instead they have a jury.
“Help” Means Removing the Burden — Not Adding Another Prescription
Clancy was prescribed numerous psychiatric medications during the months before the killings. Court evidence showed that she received a complex series of medications from multiple providers, including antidepressants, antipsychotics, benzodiazepines and sedatives. (Boston Globe)
That does not automatically mean the doctors caused what happened. Mental health treatment is not an exact science. Different patients respond differently to medication, and the clinicians treating Clancy were trying to help a desperately ill woman whose symptoms were changing rapidly.
But the sheer complexity of the treatment raises another question.
At what point does treatment need to become containment, rest and intensive supervision rather than another adjustment to medication which can oftentimes take months to show results?
The system continued trying to make her functional. Perhaps the question should have been whether she needed to be functional at all.
Not because she did not love her children. Precisely because she did.
When a woman is mentally ill enough to disclose thoughts of harming herself or her children, separating her from the daily responsibility of childcare should not necessarily be seen as punishment or an accusation that she is a bad mother.
It can be a chance to sleep, stabilise, receive psychiatric care and become herself again before being asked to carry the enormous responsibilities of motherhood.
And What About the Person Beside Her?
This is where the Clancy story becomes uncomfortable in another way.
Patrick Clancy has suffered an unimaginable loss. Nothing about what happened to his children can be minimised, and nothing about his subsequent life should be used to attack him.
He has also publicly forgiven Lindsay. Days after the killings, he described the woman he knew as loving and caring and asked others to forgive her. During the trial, he testified about her deteriorating mental health and said she had told him about suicidal thoughts and thoughts of harming the children. More recently, he has spoken about the need for greater awareness of perinatal mental illness. (NBC News)
Patrick has since divorced Lindsay and remarried. He has every right to rebuild his life. He has every right to find love again. He does not have to spend the rest of his life imprisoned by a tragedy he did not cause.
But moving on is not the same thing as being absolved of every question about what happened before the tragedy.
That distinction matters.
When a wife tells her husband she is thinking about suicide or frightening thoughts about her children are entering her mind, what is the husband’s responsibility? When a daughter tells her mother she is having terrifying thoughts, what is the family’s responsibility?
When the woman herself has voluntarily admitted herself to psychiatric care as Lindsay did (CBS News), what does everyone around her owe her when she says she is ready to come home?
These are not questions about blame but prevention.
We cannot simultaneously tell women that they need to “ask for help” and then, when they actually do, expect them to continue performing every ordinary responsibility.
There is also something so profoundly unequal about motherhood. Just because one parent did not give birth to the children does not make the burden of protecting the family any less theirs.
A struggling mother should not have to be the project manager of her own rescue.
Sometimes the people beside her have to intervene and say: You are not going back to normal life yet. We will take over. You recover. We have the children. We will deal with the house. We will deal with everything else.
That is what a village is supposed to mean.
Patrick’s forgiveness does not erase his children’s deaths but it does challenge our instinct to divide the world neatly into monsters and victims.
If Lindsay is eventually found not criminally responsible, that does not mean she walks free into a normal life. Even a crime committed due to severe mental illness often results in continued psychiatric confinement.
That is precisely why it’s hard to simply deem Lindsay Clancy a “criminal” in the conventional sense. Criminality ordinarily implies a person who possesses the capacity to understand what they are doing and chooses to do it anyway.
The entire question before the jury was whether that was Lindsay Clancy.
And 11 jurors ultimately said no.
The Jury Gave Us Another Uncomfortable Lesson
The jury was composed of nine women and three men. According to jurors who later spoke publicly, the initial deliberations were split: eight leaned toward finding Clancy not criminally responsible, two were undecided and two favoured conviction. Eventually, all but one juror supported an insanity verdict. (The Guardian)
Records show that the holdout juror had previously faced a domestic-violence assault-and-battery charge after his wife alleged that he grabbed her by the throat and threw her into a dresser. The charge was later dismissed. (CBS News)
While this doesn’t necessarily prove a bias against women or mental illness, it does raise legitimate questions about information disclosed when the juror was seated.
It’s important to note the jurors were not deciding whether the killings were horrific, but whether a woman suffering from profound psychiatric illness was criminally responsible for what she did.
And Then Came the Pardon Debate
After the mistrial, Clancy’s lawyer appealed publicly to President Donald Trump for a pardon.
Trump’s response was legally correct: this is a Massachusetts state prosecution, and the President does not have federal pardon power over state crimes. Trump said the matter would have to be resolved at the state level. (Boston.com)
But the episode raises a broader question about how society understands mercy. Had Clancy’s case been a federal prosecution, she could at least have been eligible to seek a presidential pardon. Whether Trump would have granted one is impossible to know and there is no basis to assume that he would have but the contrast is nevertheless striking.
Trump has used federal clemency extraordinarily broadly, including pardoning or commuting sentences for roughly 1,500 people charged or convicted in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, including members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. (Thewhitehouse.gov)
It’s astounding how much easier our political and cultural vocabulary seems to find space for mercy when discussing ideological or political violence than when discussing a mother’s catastrophic psychiatric illness.
Perhaps that is because mental illness remains invisible.
This Cannot Simply Be a Story About a Woman Who Killed Her Children
It has to be a story about what happened before that moment.
About the woman who said she could not sleep, said she was drowning, sought psychiatric care and called suicide hotlines. The woman whose family knew she was having terrifying thoughts and who voluntarily entered psychiatric treatment.
And ultimately, the woman who tried to kill herself after killing her children — an act that complicates any simplistic narrative of a mother who wanted to “get rid” of her children and continue living happily without them.
None of this absolves Clancy. Understanding is not absolution.
But understanding is how prevention begins.
Lindsay Clancy is not someone who should simply be “let go” and sent home to live a normal life. The appropriate response to a woman who may have committed an unimaginable act while profoundly psychotic should be continued psychiatric care, supervision and treatment – not pretending nothing happened.
However, it must be emphasized that this was not simply a criminal case, but a medical crisis that became a catastrophe. And it was, perhaps most painfully, a warning about what happens when a woman can be profoundly unwell and still feel that her first obligation is to keep performing motherhood.
We need to stop asking mothers to be superheroes.
We need husbands who listen before they are asked. Families who intervene before there is a disaster.
Doctors who ask difficult questions repeatedly. Healthcare systems that have somewhere safe to put a mother when home is no longer safe.
And communities that replace judgment with compassion.
Perhaps the most devastating thing about Lindsay Clancy is not simply that she killed her children. It is that, in the months before she did, she was telling people she was sick and no one listened. That is the part of this story we cannot afford to ignore.
About Opinion: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Miss Reporter News.
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