{"id":789638,"date":"2026-07-28T16:38:18","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T16:38:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/789638\/"},"modified":"2026-07-28T16:38:18","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T16:38:18","slug":"in-the-lindsay-clancy-trial-mental-health-treatment-is-also-on-the-stand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/789638\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Lindsay Clancy trial, mental health treatment is also on the stand"},"content":{"rendered":"

Will it work against Lindsay Clancy, the labor and delivery nurse who killed her three young children in January 2023, a month after Sanders was convicted? In stark contrast, legions are tuning in to this case. The courtroom was packed as testimony in Clancy\u2019s trial began Monday, the proceedings carried live by numerous outlets, including the Globe.<\/p>\n

Sanders was poor and Black. Her case didn\u2019t attract even a fraction of the national attention and outpouring of sympathy<\/a> for her family that Clancy\u2019s has. Sanders\u2019 family had no resources to correct the narrative in the wake of the killings, to explain how Sanders\u2019 mental illness had been worsening over the years, how she resisted treatment. <\/p>\n

And so, mostly unseen at the time, the prosecutor was able to turn Sanders into a monster in the courtroom. Prosecutor Amanda Fowle argued she killed her children because she was \u201cevil,\u201d that she wanted to get rich via a GoFundMe, and write a book that would make her famous. She was faking her mental illness to get away with it, the prosecutor argued. Fowle succeeded in getting the judge to exclude from evidence detailed prison medical records documenting Sanders\u2019 psychosis. That exclusion is central to an appeal being decided by the state\u2019s highest court. <\/p>\n

Clancy is a middle-class white woman from Duxbury, with all the resources that implies. Following the killings, her loved ones and her attorneys made sure to tell the world she was a loving mother who would never have harmed her children if not for her profound postpartum mental illness. Unlike in Sanders\u2019 case, there is extensive evidence of Clancy\u2019s mental health struggles leading up to the killings, contained in her medical records, and in a pair of civil lawsuits<\/a> against her health providers. They lay out the family\u2019s repeated, fruitless attempts<\/a> to get her postpartum mental illness under control: She was given more than 30 prescriptions in the months before the killings. <\/p>\n

\u201cI wasn\u2019t married to a monster,\u201d her former husband, Patrick Clancy, told The New Yorker<\/a> in 2024. \u201cI was married to someone who got sick.\u201d<\/p>\n

Far more eyes are on Plymouth District Attorney Timothy Cruz and his assistant prosecutors this time. Calling Clancy \u201cevil\u201d probably won\u2019t fly. So they\u2019re going with \u201cselfish,\u201d and \u201ccontrolling,\u201d arguing that the woman who killed her children was not the loving mother depicted in the photographs and videos presented to the jury so far. <\/p>\n

\u201cIn contrast to pictures you\u2019ll see of the doting mother, the dedicated nurse, you\u2019ll also see a side of Lindsay Clancy that\u2019s different,\u201d prosecutor Shanan Buckingham said in her opening argument. \u201cSomebody extremely controlling, meticulous, and manipulative.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"“This\u201cThis was a woman who no longer liked the life she thought she wanted,\u201d Plymouth Assistant District Attorney Shanan Buckingham said of Lindsay Clancy in the state’s opening argument.Greg Derr\/The Patriot Ledger\/Pool<\/p>\n

In court documents, prosecutors said Clancy \u201cdid not feel love or connection with some of her kids,\u201d and in the courtroom Monday, the prosecutor said it was \u201chard for her to bond with her kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was a woman who no longer liked the life she thought she wanted,\u201d Buckingham told jurors. \u201cAnd when she saw the opportunity to escape, she made the selfish choice to take it, and to take Cora, Dawson, and Callan first before attempting to take her own life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even if that was true, wouldn\u2019t that logic also be a sign of profound mental illness?<\/p>\n

But the prosecutor\u2019s own exhibits from the trial\u2019s first day make that image of a selfish mother difficult to swallow. Clancy and her husband clearly both doted on the kids, constantly texting cute pictures of Cora, Dawson, and Callan back and forth. They took them on adventures, to a water park and to the Museum of Science. <\/p>\n

On the day she killed the children, Clancy took Cora to the doctor in the morning, texting Patrick with relief: \u201cOK her urine looked good so nothing going wrong with her kidneys. Phew.\u201d Later, she built a snowman in the yard with Cora and Dawson, sending pictures to her mother and husband.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re a good mama,\u201d Patrick texted back from his office in the basement. <\/p>\n

In the prosecutor\u2019s telling, these daily activities \u201cwere inconsistent\u201d with the serious symptoms she was reporting to her health providers \u2013 depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, thoughts of harming herself and the children. She cast doubt on Clancy\u2019s claim that a voice in her head suddenly told her to kill the children and herself, because she had not reported hearing them before she killed the children, or since. <\/p>\n

But mental illness, including psychosis, doesn\u2019t always look like it does in old movies. <\/p>\n

\u201cOftentimes, people have a caricature in mind of what someone is like who would commit a heinous crime, that they are howling at the moon or standing on their head,\u201d forensic psychiatrist Dr. Mark Rudolph told me, when I reported on the Sanders case last year. \u201cMore often than not, however, that is not how someone presents who is psychotic.\u201d<\/p>\n

A person struggling with severe mental illness may appear calm and perform daily tasks as usual. They can love and care for their children without showing obvious signs of disintegration. The symptoms of psychosis can take time to manifest clearly. Its early signs include mood swings, confusion, irritability, anxiety, or feeling depressed, which can go on for months before more obvious symptoms \u2013 like auditory hallucinations \u2013 appear. Only in retrospect is the progression clear.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s often hard for 12 ordinary people to grasp all of this \u2013 especially after, as in the Sanders case, they\u2019ve been shown gruesome photographs of dead children, and heard testimony from multiple first responders describing the horrific scene they came upon after a 911 call. The jury in this case, too, will be bombarded with many awful photographs and gut-wrenching testimony from multiple police officers and EMTs. <\/p>\n

The natural response to a tragedy like this is to want to hold somebody accountable, because how can a person who does such a thing go unpunished? <\/p>\n

Clancy\u2019s attorney Kevin Reddington tried to assure jurors on Monday that Clancy will be punished forever, even if they find her not guilty by reason of insanity (that would mean she\u2019d be confined to a psychiatric facility until a judge decides it is safe to release her).<\/p>\n

Clancy \u201cwill be paralyzed for the rest of her life,\u201d he told them. \u201cShe\u2019s living her own hell. She knows what happened with those kids, and she wanted to die when she was in the hospital. \u2026 To this day, [she] wants to die.\u201d<\/p>\n

Over the next few weeks, we will see more than Lindsay Clancy on trial in that courtroom. Among the other defendants will be a medical system that failed to effectively treat the mental illness of a woman who had the wherewithal to seek help, and was a health professional herself. And a justice system that, all too often, fails mentally ill defendants. <\/p>\n

Perhaps Clancy will have a better chance than Sanders did. <\/p>\n

Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yvonne.abraham@globe.com<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Will it work against Lindsay Clancy, the labor and delivery nurse who killed her three young children in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":789639,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[97,201892,259,260],"class_list":["post-789638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-health","tag-lindsay-clancy","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=789638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789638\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/789639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=789638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=789638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=789638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}