A mother who’s on trial for murdering her three young children wrote diary entries about her worsening postpartum mental health and told clinicians she thought she was experiencing severe side effects from the psychiatric medications she was prescribed.
“I’m so desperate to get a mental break from taking care of everyone that my mind is trying to find something physically wrong with me,” Lindsay Clancy wrote in November 2022. Clancy fatally attacked her children on January 24, 2023.
“I want help. I want to be well,” she said in another entry. She also said she felt “incredibly sad and guilty” about being unable to breastfeed her youngest child and was “obsessed” with his sleep schedule.
“I have crazy brain fog. I feel like I can’t make a plan,” Clancy wrote. “I live moment to moment waiting for the next nap time. I’m terrified of Cal getting overtired now because I feel I can’t help him.”
Additionally, Clancy’s defense team said that in December the mother told a crisis service that she believed her symptoms were side effects from psychiatric medications she had been prescribed.
In the months leading up to the incident, Clancy was prescribed numerous medications, including Zoloft, Ativan, Benadryl, trazodone, Prozac, Ambien, Remeron, Klonopin, Seroquel, Valium, and amitriptyline, with doctors changing or adjusting her medications over time as her symptoms persisted.
Several of the psychiatric medications listed potential side effects, including agitation, insomnia, suicidal thoughts, confusion, and — in rare cases — hallucinations or psychotic symptoms. According to court filings, Clancy’s medication regimen changed multiple times during the fall and winter of 2022.
Clancy does not dispute that she strangled her three young children — 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson, and 8-month-old Callan — inside the family’s home in Duxbury, Massachusetts, in January 2023 after her then-husband left to pick up takeout food and medication. Prosecutors say Clancy then attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window after cutting both of her wrists. All three children died, and Clancy was left paralyzed from the waist down.
Earlier this week, the defense team tried to counter the state’s argument that Clancy was organized and calculating in her actions and therefore not clinically insane. Dr. Sejal Shah, who testified as a rebuttal witness for the defense and is a forensic psychiatrist, agreed with the defense that “people can communicate and plan and act on plans even if they’re in the middle of a psychosis.”
Shah also agreed that someone does not have to be “drooling and stumbling and unable to walk and talk” in order to be psychotic.
Clancy has many public supporters who believe she should be treated by medical professionals and avoid jail time, citing what they see as the medical system’s failure, particularly given that Clancy was newly postpartum when her symptoms first appeared. Others have acknowledged the unhealthy and sometimes dangerous reliance on pills and medications to treat mental health struggles while still believing Clancy needs to be held accountable for killing three innocent children.
A jury is expected to render a verdict by the end of August or early September.
Related: Lindsay Clancy Strangled Her Three Children. Why Some People Want Her Set Free.
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