Why this case has left me confused, concerned and conflicted

Content note: This article discusses the deaths of children, severe mental illness, postpartum psychosis and suicide. It does not contain graphic descriptions.

There are some criminal cases where forming an opinion seems relatively straightforward.

The Lindsay Clancy case is not one of them.

I have followed the recent trial with a mixture of sadness, confusion and discomfort. I have watched people respond with extraordinary compassion toward Lindsay Clancy. I have also watched others react with anger, asking how sympathy can seemingly shift away from three children who lost their lives and toward the person responsible for killing them.

And, as a man observing a conversation that has become deeply connected with motherhood and the experience of women after childbirth, I have found myself reluctant to make sweeping judgments.

I cannot know what pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum hormonal changes or postpartum psychiatric illness feel like.

But I can try to understand them.

At the same time, I don’t believe being outside that experience requires me — or anyone else — to abandon questions about responsibility, justice or the lives of the children involved.

Perhaps that is why this case is so difficult.

It forces us to hold several uncomfortable truths at once.

What actually happened in the trial?

Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts mother and former nurse, was charged with murdering her three children — Cora, five, Dawson, three, and Callan, eight months — in January 2023.

Clancy did not dispute that she killed her children. The central question at trial was whether she was criminally responsible for what she did.

Her defence argued that she was experiencing severe mental illness, including postpartum psychosis, and was therefore not criminally responsible.

Prosecutors argued that despite her psychiatric problems, she remained capable of understanding what she was doing and that her actions demonstrated planning and intentional behaviour. Medical and psychiatric experts presented competing interpretations of her mental state.

After a trial lasting roughly six weeks, jurors deliberated for almost 40 hours across seven days.

They could not reach a unanimous decision.

On September 4, 2026, the judge declared a mistrial. Clancy therefore has not been convicted — but neither has she been acquitted. The criminal case remains unresolved, and prosecutors can seek another trial.

That distinction matters.

Public discussion sometimes treats the mistrial as though the legal system decided Clancy was suffering from postpartum psychosis and therefore innocent.

It did not.

Nor did the court determine that she was a calculating murderer.

The jury could not unanimously decide the question.

In many ways, its inability to do so mirrors the argument now taking place outside the courtroom.

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First, we need to understand postpartum psychosis

One problem with discussing this case is that the phrase postpartum psychosis can sound almost abstract until we understand what psychosis actually means.

This is not simply feeling depressed, overwhelmed, exhausted or anxious after having a baby.

Postpartum psychosis is a rare and potentially severe psychiatric condition involving a loss of contact with reality.

Symptoms can include hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, confusion, mania, severe mood disturbance and profoundly disorganised thinking. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists estimates postpartum psychosis occurs in approximately one to three of every 1,000 births and describes it as requiring immediate psychiatric intervention.

The National Institute of Mental Health similarly describes postpartum psychosis as a psychiatric emergency that can involve delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, mania and confusion.

That matters because a person experiencing genuine psychosis may perceive a reality substantially different from the one perceived by everyone around them.

This is one of the most difficult concepts for someone who has never experienced psychosis to comprehend.

We naturally look at behaviour retrospectively and think:

Surely she knew what she was doing.

But psychiatry asks another question:

What was her mind actually capable of understanding at that particular moment?

That is a very different question.

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But mental illness and legal insanity are not the same thing

This distinction may be the most important lesson from the entire case.

Someone can be extremely mentally ill and still be legally responsible for a crime.

Conversely, a person can physically perform a deliberate series of actions while being so psychiatrically impaired that the law determines they lacked criminal responsibility.

Massachusetts law asks whether, because of a mental disease or defect, a defendant lacked the substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality or wrongfulness of their conduct or to conform their conduct to the requirements of the law.

Once the issue is properly raised, Massachusetts places the burden on the prosecution to establish criminal responsibility beyond reasonable doubt.

This is why arguments such as:

“She planned it, so she couldn’t have been psychotic.”

or

“She was psychotic, so she couldn’t possibly be responsible.”

are both overly simplistic.

Psychiatry and law are dealing with something considerably more complicated.

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And this is where the Clancy trial became difficult

The experts did not all agree.

Defence experts testified that Clancy was psychotic. They described her as suffering from postpartum psychosis and presented evidence concerning what she later described as a commanding male voice telling her to kill her children and herself.

Forensic psychiatrist Dr Phil Resnick testified for the defence that Clancy suffered from bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis and experienced what he considered a command hallucination.

The prosecution challenged that interpretation.

Its experts questioned whether her reported hallucinations were genuine and whether her presentation was consistent with postpartum psychosis. One prosecution expert suggested her description of an isolated command hallucination was clinically unusual and questioned whether the symptoms had been exaggerated or fabricated.

The prosecution also pointed toward behaviours it believed demonstrated planning and awareness.

And this is where I think responsible commentary needs to become comfortable saying three words that social media rarely rewards:

We don’t know.

I wasn’t inside Lindsay Clancy’s mind.

Neither were the thousands of people arguing about her online.

Experts examined the evidence and disagreed.

A jury heard weeks of evidence and could not unanimously resolve the disagreement.

Certainty from spectators should therefore make us cautious.

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The question that troubles me most: Where do the children fit?

There is another part of this discussion that deserves sensitivity.

Cora, Dawson and Callan should never become supporting characters in a debate about maternal mental health.

They were three children.

Whatever ultimately caused their mother’s actions, their lives ended.

Their father lost all three of his children.

Their extended family lost three children they loved.

Nothing about recognising the seriousness of postpartum psychosis requires us to minimise that reality.

And nothing about mourning those children requires us to deny the possibility that the person who killed them may have been profoundly psychiatrically ill.

These truths can coexist.

I think this is where some of the public conversation has gone wrong.

People are being asked to choose a team:

Lindsay or the children.

Mental illness or accountability.

Compassion or justice.

Real life is rarely that clean.

We can have immense compassion for someone suffering catastrophic mental illness while simultaneously grieving the irreversible harm caused during that illness.

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Does compassion mean excusing what happened?

This is another question I have wrestled with.

I don’t think it does.

Understanding behaviour is not necessarily the same thing as approving it.

Explaining something is not automatically excusing it.

And recognising diminished criminal responsibility does not mean declaring an act acceptable.

If a person experiencing Alzheimer’s disease attacks someone because they genuinely believe that person is an intruder, understanding the neurological explanation does not make the injuries disappear.

It changes how we interpret responsibility.

Psychosis raises a similar philosophical and legal question.

If the brain responsible for making moral judgments, interpreting reality and controlling behaviour is profoundly malfunctioning, how much moral responsibility remains?

There isn’t an easy answer.

That is precisely why societies created legal standards for criminal responsibility rather than asking juries simply whether an act was horrific.

No one seriously disputes the horror.

The question is what was happening within the mind that produced it.

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Why has the case become such a gendered debate?

This part fascinates and unsettles me.

Many women discussing this case appear to recognise something in it that many men cannot personally experience: the psychological vulnerability that can accompany pregnancy, childbirth, sleep deprivation, hormonal change and the enormous pressures associated with motherhood.

For some women, the case appears to represent a broader fear:

What happens when a mother tells the healthcare system something is seriously wrong and nobody recognises how serious it has become?

That is an important question.

Perinatal mental-health conditions remain underdiagnosed and undertreated, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

But lived experience should inform our compassion — it should not substitute for evidence.

Being a mother does not automatically make someone qualified to retrospectively diagnose Lindsay Clancy.

Likewise, being male does not automatically disqualify someone from asking questions about evidence, criminal responsibility or the rights of the children.

The conversation becomes dangerous when gender determines which questions people are permitted to ask.

Women should be able to say:

“I understand how frightening postpartum mental illness can become.”

Someone else should be able to say:

“I understand that, but I still have questions about criminal responsibility.”

Neither statement should automatically be interpreted as hostility toward the other.

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We also need to be careful about stigma

There is another danger hidden inside the enormous publicity surrounding this case.

Most people experiencing mental illness do not kill other people.

And discussion of an exceptionally rare tragedy should not create an association in the public imagination between postpartum psychiatric illness and mothers harming their children.

That could have precisely the opposite effect of what advocates want.

A new mother experiencing frightening thoughts, hallucinations or severe mood changes may already be terrified that disclosing them will lead people to label her dangerous or take her child away.

If the public begins treating postpartum psychosis as synonymous with infanticide, women may become more frightened to seek help.

Postpartum psychosis requires urgent medical treatment precisely because it can become extremely serious. It is also treatable, and recovery is possible.

The public-health message should therefore be:

Recognise it early. Take symptoms seriously. Seek immediate psychiatric assessment. Don’t shame people for disclosing them.

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Perhaps the healthcare system belongs in this conversation too

One aspect of this case should survive regardless of the eventual legal outcome.

Lindsay Clancy had extensive contact with mental-health professionals before the deaths of her children.

The adequacy of that treatment has become the subject of separate civil litigation, and allegations against healthcare providers remain allegations rather than established findings of negligence.

But the broader question is legitimate:

How good are our systems at detecting a psychiatric deterioration before it becomes an emergency?

This isn’t exclusively an American question.

Australian clinicians have also used the Clancy case to raise concerns about access to specialised perinatal psychiatric services and mother-and-baby mental-health units.

Instead of only asking:

“Was Lindsay Clancy evil or mentally ill?”

perhaps we should also be asking:

What warning signs should clinicians, partners and families recognise?

When should postpartum distress trigger urgent psychiatric assessment?

Are healthcare providers receiving enough specialist training?

Are women being believed when they say something inside them has radically changed?

Are partners taught what psychosis can look like?

Those questions may ultimately save more lives than arguing about one woman’s moral character.

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My position after following this case

I still feel conflicted.

Perhaps that isn’t a weakness.

Perhaps it is the most appropriate response to something this complicated.

I believe three children deserve to remain at the centre of our compassion.

I believe their deaths require justice.

I also believe postpartum psychosis is real, serious and capable of profoundly altering someone’s perception of reality.

I believe mental illness should never become a convenient explanation applied without evidence.

But I equally believe we should not reject psychiatric evidence simply because the consequences of accepting it make us uncomfortable.

I don’t know whether Lindsay Clancy was legally criminally responsible on January 24, 2023.

A courtroom spent weeks attempting to answer that question and ultimately couldn’t.

So I am reluctant to pretend that watching news reports or reading social-media posts gives me certainty that a jury itself could not reach.

What I do know is that this case should make us talk more seriously about maternal mental health.

It should make us talk about criminal responsibility without treating psychiatric illness as imaginary.

It should make us talk about victims without stripping mentally ill defendants of their humanity.

And perhaps most importantly, it should remind us that compassion is not a finite resource.

We should not have to take compassion away from three children in order to give some to their mother.

Nor should recognising a mother’s severe psychiatric illness require forgetting what happened to her children.

Sometimes two seemingly opposing truths have to be carried together.

What happened to Cora, Dawson and Callan was unimaginably tragic.

And it remains possible that the mind of the woman who caused their deaths was profoundly unwell.

The difficult work for psychiatry, medicine and the law is determining where illness ends and responsibility begins.

The difficult work for the rest of us may simply be resisting the temptation to pretend that answer is easy.

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If this story raises concerns for you

Postpartum psychosis is considered a psychiatric emergency. Hallucinations, delusions, severe confusion, paranoia, dramatic behavioural changes or concerns about the safety of a parent or child require urgent professional assessment.

In Australia, if someone is in immediate danger, call 000. Lifeline provides 24-hour crisis support on 13 11 14.