We’re Asking The Wrong Questions About Lindsay Clancy

Three children are dead: Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy. Their deaths have become the center of one of the most disturbing criminal cases in the country, but they have also become something else: a Rorschach test for how Americans think about mental illness, motherhood, criminal responsibility, medicine, and justice.

Everyone seems to have an explanation. Lindsay Clancy was a cold-blooded murderer. Lindsay Clancy was a severely mentally ill woman experiencing postpartum psychosis. Her doctors failed her. Her husband failed her. Someone knew what was coming and should have stopped it. Depending on which corner of the internet you visit, you can find somebody absolutely certain of almost every version of the story.

But there is a problem with certainty: the trial isn’t over.

As of August 22, 2026, Clancy’s defense has rested and prosecutors are presenting their rebuttal before closing arguments. The defense does not dispute that Clancy killed her three children; its argument is that she was not criminally responsible because she was suffering from severe mental illness, including postpartum psychosis. The prosecution argues that she was depressed but not psychotic, that she understood what she was doing, and that the killings were intentional. Psychiatric experts on both sides have offered dramatically different assessments of her mental state. (The Guardian⁠)

That disagreement is precisely why I am hesitant to tell you what happened. I wasn’t there. Neither were you. We haven’t examined the medical records, interviewed the witnesses, evaluated Clancy, or sat through every hour of testimony. The people who have done those things disagree with one another, and the jury is now being asked to determine which interpretation of the evidence is correct.

So my position is a simple one: show me the evidence.

If Lindsay Clancy deliberately murdered her children in cold blood, show me the evidence. If she was experiencing a catastrophic psychotic episode and genuinely believed she was protecting her children, show me the evidence. If her doctors failed to recognize a psychiatric emergency or provided negligent care, show me the evidence. If her husband knew she was becoming dangerous and failed to act, show me the evidence. And if those accusations are not supported by the evidence, then show me that, too.

Three children deserve more than our speculation, our conspiracy theories and our TikTok’s.

The Part of This Story We Should All Be Talking About

Regardless of what the jury ultimately decides, the Clancy case has forced an uncomfortable subject into the national conversation: what can happen to a woman’s mental health during pregnancy and after childbirth?

We tend to prepare women for the physical realities of pregnancy. We talk about blood pressure, hemorrhage, preeclampsia, C-sections, blood clots, breastfeeding, recovery and sleep deprivation. We have become increasingly comfortable discussing postpartum depression, too. But there is another category of illness that deserves considerably more attention because, although it is rare, it can become a psychiatric emergency almost overnight.

That is postpartum psychosis.

Postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis should not be treated as though they are simply different points on a scale of being a tired or overwhelmed new mother. Postpartum depression can involve persistent sadness, anxiety, hopelessness, guilt, loss of interest and difficulty functioning. It is a serious medical condition, but it is also treatable, and the vast majority of women who experience postpartum depression do not become dangerous to themselves or anyone else. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends screening for depression and anxiety during pregnancy and postpartum and emphasizes that positive screenings need to be connected to actual assessment, treatment, monitoring and follow-up. (ACOG⁠)

Postpartum psychosis is different. ACOG describes it as very rare and serious, involving a sudden onset of psychotic symptoms after childbirth. It can include hallucinations, delusions, paranoia and disorganized thinking, and it may involve poor insight into the illness itself. ACOG specifically recommends immediate medical attention when postpartum psychosis is suspected. (ACOG⁠)

A mother can have an intrusive thought that horrifies her. She can be frightened by something that crosses her mind and have absolutely no desire to act on it. That is not the same thing as losing contact with reality and believing a delusion to be true. We should not frighten mothers into believing that every disturbing thought means they are dangerous, nor should we dismiss genuine warning signs because postpartum struggles are considered normal.

The question should be what is actually happening. Is she sleeping? Has her behavior changed dramatically? Is she becoming increasingly paranoid or confused? Is she hearing or seeing things other people don’t? Does she believe something demonstrably untrue? Is she suicidal? Does she believe someone is trying to hurt her or her baby? Does she recognize that something is wrong?

Those aren’t questions designed to stigmatize new mothers. They’re questions designed to recognize when a medical condition may have progressed beyond something that a family can safely manage at home.

Screening Is Not the Same Thing as Treatment

ACOG’s recommendations are encouraging. It recommends standardized screening for depression and anxiety at the initial prenatal visit, later in pregnancy, and during postpartum care. It also recommends screening for bipolar disorder before certain medications are prescribed when a history has not already been established, and it emphasizes immediate assessment when someone answers a self-harm or suicide question affirmatively. (ACOG⁠)

A woman can answer questions on a form, receive a score, and still fall through the cracks. The real test of a mental-health system isn’t whether it knows how to identify a problem. It’s whether there is somewhere for that person to go once the problem has been identified. That requires doctors who know what they’re looking for, communication between providers, appropriate psychiatric services, access to treatment, follow-up, and families who understand what constitutes an emergency. It also requires something that is often overlooked: the willingness to take a person’s deterioration seriously before the situation becomes spectacular enough to make the news.

The testimony in the Clancy trial has included evidence about changes in Lindsay’s mental state, suicidal thoughts, fears about harming her children, medical treatment, and conflicting professional assessments of whether she was psychotic. Reuters reported that family members described concerning changes before the killings, while prosecutors have presented evidence they say demonstrates planning and intentionality. This is exactly why the evidence matters so much. The same case can contain evidence that looks frighteningly consistent with psychosis to one expert and evidence that looks like deliberate planning to another. (Reuters⁠)

Mental-Health Crisis

The Clancy case is extraordinary, but the underlying problem is not. According to the federal government’s 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 61.5 million American adults experienced some form of mental illness during the previous year. Of those, 14.6 million experienced serious mental illness. About 70.8% of adults with serious mental illness received mental-health treatment, which means roughly 4.3 million adults with serious mental illness received no mental-health treatment at all. (SAMHSA⁠)

That statistic needs some nuance. America does provide mental-health treatment to millions of people. The problem isn’t that nobody is getting care. The problem is that the people who aren’t getting care are still counted in the millions.

The situation becomes even more complicated when serious mental illness and substance-use disorders overlap. In 2024, 6.9 million adults had both serious mental illness and a substance-use disorder. Of those, approximately 2.1 million received neither mental-health treatment nor substance-use treatment during the year. (SAMHSA⁠)

Those numbers represent people whose problems don’t fit neatly into separate categories. Someone can be mentally ill and addicted. Someone can be homeless and psychotic. Someone can have trauma, substance abuse and severe depression at the same time. Someone can cycle between hospitals, jails, shelters, emergency rooms and the street without ever receiving the sustained care necessary to address the underlying problems.That is not simply a question of whether somebody is compassionate enough. It is a question of whether the system works.

Look at California

Lets look in my lovely backyard of California. A major UCSF study of homelessness in California found that approximately 48% of adults experiencing homelessness had at least one complex behavioral-health need. The researchers defined that category using factors including regular drug use, heavy episodic alcohol use, current hallucinations, or recent psychiatric hospitalization. About 35% reported current regular illicit drug use, while 12% reported current hallucinations. (Benioff Housing Initiative⁠)

That does not mean that 48% of homeless people are “crazy,” and it would be irresponsible to say so. It means that nearly half of the people studied had behavioral-health challenges significant enough to fall into the researchers’ definition of complex need.

The distinction matters because homelessness itself is not a psychiatric diagnosis. Many people become homeless for economic, relational, housing or other reasons and do not have severe mental illness. I’ve had family in this struggle that have seen their way out of it and I couldn’t be more proud of their hard work to get off the streets, to get an apartment that isn’t their car, and prevent their circumstances from worsening their mental health. At the same time, a substantial portion of the homeless population is dealing with serious behavioral-health problems that cannot be solved by housing alone.

Housing matters. Of course it does. But housing does not automatically treat psychosis. A person can have an apartment and still be hallucinating. A person can have a bed and still be addicted. A person can have a permanent address and still be profoundly mentally ill.

We need housing. We need psychiatric care. We need addiction treatment. We need crisis services. We need family support. We need systems that can keep people connected to care after the immediate crisis has passed. We need public safety. More than anything, we need to be honest about the fact that these things have to work together.

What Happens When Someone Doesn’t Know They’re Sick?

Imagine that someone you love becomes severely mentally ill. You can see that something is wrong, but they cannot. They don’t believe they’re sick. They refuse medication. They refuse counseling. They refuse to go to the hospital. They may believe that the people trying to help them are actually part of the problem. What is the family supposed to do?

There is a legitimate reason we protect people from being involuntarily confined simply because someone else thinks they are mentally ill. A psychiatric diagnosis should not mean that the government can take away someone’s liberty whenever another person finds their behavior strange or inconvenient.

But there is another legitimate concern. What happens when someone becomes so severely ill that they genuinely cannot recognize their own condition? We have to protect civil liberties without confusing liberty with abandonment. Compassion does not require us to watch someone deteriorate indefinitely. Treatment should not have to wait until someone commits an irreversible act.

Mental Illness and Mass Shootings

A 2023 National Institute of Justice review found that 59% of public mass shooters had a confirmed history of mental-health struggles. (Office of Justice Programs⁠) Instead of asking only whether a shooter had a psychiatric diagnosis, we should ask whether the person was deteriorating, whether anyone noticed, whether there were warning signs, whether the person was in crisis, whether someone knew about the crisis, and whether there was a realistic way to intervene.

The overwhelming majority of people with mental illness are not violent. If we treat mental illness itself as a predictor of violence, we will stigmatize millions of innocent people while still failing to identify the comparatively tiny number of people who actually become dangerous. The goal should not be to label mentally ill people as dangerous. The goal should be to recognize dangerous behavior and severe deterioration when it actually occurs.

We Have to Stop Choosing Between Compassion and Accountability

Our public conversation about mental illness often falls into one of two extremes. One side wants mental illness to explain everything; the other wants it to explain nothing.

Neither position is adequate.

A person can be seriously mentally ill and still have caused horrific harm. A person can deserve compassion and still need accountability. A healthcare system can fail somebody without that automatically establishing that the person had no responsibility for anything they did. A family can love someone desperately and still be incapable of keeping them safe. A person can suffer from severe mental illness without being dangerous at all.

That’s also why I don’t want to make the Lindsay Clancy case into a referendum on whether mental illness is “real.” Of course it is. Our focus needs to be on what happened in this particular case, what the evidence demonstrates about Lindsay’s mental state, what her doctors knew, what her family knew, and what could reasonably have been done.

What We Owe Mothers

If there is one area where I hope this case changes our national conversation, it is maternal mental health. We have spent decades becoming better at recognizing the physical dangers of pregnancy and childbirth. We need to become equally serious about recognizing psychiatric danger.

Pregnancy and childbirth can be physically exhausting, emotionally overwhelming and psychologically complicated. Postpartum depression deserves treatment. Postpartum anxiety deserves treatment. Bipolar disorder can emerge or worsen around pregnancy and childbirth. And postpartum psychosis, although rare, requires immediate attention because a woman can lose contact with reality and may have little insight into what is happening to her. (ACOG⁠)

That means husbands need to know what to look for. Parents need to know what to look for. Friends need to know what to look for. Churches need to know what to look for. Doctors need to know what to look for. Mom’s need to know that asking for help does not make them bad mothers.

If a new mother says she is depressed, believe her. If she says she isn’t sleeping, pay attention. If she says she is having frightening thoughts, don’t shame her. If she seems confused or paranoid or detached from reality, don’t assume she’s simply exhausted. If she says she is hearing voices or believes something bizarre is happening, don’t wait for the next scheduled appointment. Get help now.

So, What Do We Do With Lindsay Clancy?

I don’t know what the jury will decide.And neither do you. I know that isn’t an evasive answer, but it’s an honest one. Our responsibility is different. Our responsibility is to be careful about what we claim to know.

If Lindsay Clancy murdered her children while fully understanding the nature and wrongfulness of what she was doing, then justice matters. If she was experiencing postpartum psychosis so severe that she genuinely lost contact with reality, then we need to understand what that illness did to her and whether anything could have been done to prevent the tragedy. If medical professionals failed to recognize or appropriately treat a psychiatric crisis, that deserves accountability. If they did not, we should not invent negligence simply because we desperately want an explanation. If her husband knew something was terribly wrong and failed to act, then that should be examined too. But if the evidence shows that he did not know what was coming, we owe him the same restraint we owe everyone else.

Show me the evidence.

Because three children are dead, and their deaths deserve something better than our certainty without evidence. Those babies deserve the truth. Whatever the jury ultimately decides, I hope we don’t allow this case to disappear from our national conversation the moment the verdict is announced. We should use it to ask harder questions about maternal mental health, postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis, access to psychiatric treatment, the treatment of severe mental illness, homelessness, addiction, crisis intervention and the difficult line between individual liberty and society’s responsibility to intervene when someone is profoundly sick.

We should ask why millions of Americans with serious mental illness still receive no treatment. We should ask why so many people with complex behavioral-health needs remain on the streets. We should ask why families can sometimes see a crisis developing but feel powerless to stop it. We should ask why we are often better at responding to psychiatric emergencies after they become disasters than we are at intervening when the warning signs first appear.

We should ask those questions without turning mentally ill people into monsters. Most people with mental illness are not violent. Most mothers with postpartum depression will never harm their children. Most people experiencing homelessness are not dangerous. A psychiatric diagnosis does not make somebody a threat to society.

Severe mental illness can be devastating. Psychosis can be terrifying. Addiction can destroy lives. Families can be overwhelmed. People can become dangerous. When that happens, compassion cannot mean pretending that nothing is wrong.

I hope we can become better at recognizing suffering before it becomes a tragedy. Why build systems that just merely identify people in crisis without a solution? We should insist on evidence before we accuse anyone of causing a tragedy. Remember that justice and compassion are not enemies. Christ taught us that.

Why is our culture is so much better at debating mental illness after catastrophe than treating it before tragedy strikes? What are we afraid to say? We have become very good at saying: “Don’t stigmatize mental illness.” Good. But sometimes that gets interpreted as: “Don’t intervene.” People with mental illness deserve dignity. People experiencing severe psychiatric deterioration deserve treatment. Families deserve the ability to get help before someone dies.

We’re asking the wrong the questions about Lindsay Clancy. It isn’t simply “Was she evil or mentally ill?” It’s “What happens when severe mental illness goes unrecognized, untreated, or inadequately treated? And who should be held accountable? Does mental illness excuse moral responsibility?” Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy deserve better than to have their deaths reduced to another internet theory or true-crime spectacle.

Show me the evidence.

Signing out for now. Talk to you again soon. Thanks for reading.

Sources for the blog

• Lindsay Clancy trial: Current reporting from The Associated Press and The Guardian on the defense’s postpartum-psychosis argument, prosecution’s competing psychiatric evidence, and the trial’s current status. 
• Lindsay Clancy family testimony and evidence: Reuters’ August 17, 2026 trial report concerning her family’s testimony, suicidal thoughts, fears about harming her children, and evidence presented by prosecutors. 
• Postpartum mental-health screening and treatment: American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), Patient Screening and Screening and Diagnosis of Mental Health Conditions During Pregnancy and Postpartum. 
• Postpartum psychosis: ACOG’s Summary of Perinatal Mental Health Conditions, which describes postpartum psychosis as rare and serious and identifies hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, disorganization and poor insight as possible symptoms. 
• Postpartum depression: ACOG’s patient guidance on postpartum depression. 
• National mental-health statistics: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. 
• Mental illness and substance-use disorder: SAMHSA’s 2024 data showing 6.9 million adults with co-occurring serious mental illness and substance-use disorder, including approximately 2.1 million who received neither type of treatment. 
• California homelessness and behavioral health: UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, Behavioral Health and Homelessness, based on the California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness. 
• Mass shootings and mental health: National Institute of Justice, Public Mass Shootings Research, including findings that 59% of public mass shooters had a confirmed history of mental-health struggles while cautioning against treating mental illness as a simple predictor of violence. 
• Crisis and warning signs preceding mass shootings: National Institute of Justice research on crisis, suicidality, trauma and warning signs among public mass shooters.