Lindsay Clancy, left, along with her husband Patrick and their children (Facebook / Lindsay Marie Clancy)

Lindsay Clancy, a 32-year-old obstetric nurse and mother of three in Duxbury, Massachusetts, had asked her husband Patrick to run out for a quick errand to pick up medication and some takeout food.

But while Patrick was out, Lindsay used exercise bands to strangle each of their three young children to death – 5-year-old daughter Cora, 3-year-old son Dawson and 7-month old son Callan. She then went upstairs, cut her wrists and neck and jumped out of a second-story window in an attempted suicide, ending up in the backyard, paralyzed from the sternum down, and leaving her confined to a wheelchair for life. That was on Jan. 24, 2023.

With Clancy’s murder trial now scheduled to start next month on July 20, much of the news coverage of the case has emphasized Clancy’s purported viciousness in ending her children’s lives, with the New York Post headlining “Postpartum mom Lindsay Clancy killed 3 kids with ‘extreme atrocity and cruelty,'” and People magazine likewise trumpeting how Clancy “Allegedly Killed Kids with ‘Extreme Atrocity.'”

Yet today, as her legal team prepares her defense, Lindsay Clancy – who has never disputed her role in the deaths of her three children – intends to plead not guilty.

Why?

Her legal team is pursuing an insanity defense, since at the time of her children’s deaths Lindsay Clancy was not only suffering from severe postpartum depression, but was taking 12 different psychiatric drugs that had been prescribed for her. Seven of those drugs come with a “black box” warning – the Food and Drug Administration’s most urgent safety notice – of “increased suicidal thoughts and behaviors.” They included:

* Prozac (Fluoxetine), an SSRI antidepressant
* Zoloft (Sertraline), an SSRI antidepressant
* Remeron (Mirtazapine), a TeCA antidepressant
* Trazodone, an SARI antidepressant
* Amitriptyline, a TCA antidepressant
* Seroquel (Quetiapine fumarate), an “atypical antipsychotic/mood stabilizer”
* Lamictal (Lamotrigine) – an “anticonvulsant/mood stabilizer”

In addition, Clancy was taking the following similarly controversial psychiatric drugs:

* Ativan (Lorazepam) – Benzodiazepine, or “benzos” as they’re widely referred to, a class of anti-anxiety drugs associated with multiple “severe hazards”
* Klonopin (Clonazepam) – Benzodiazepine
* Valium (Diazepam) – Benzodiazepine
* Ambien (Zolpidem tartrate) – A sedative-hypnotic sleep aid associated with severe side effects, including hallucinations, confusion, aggression, anxiety, increased depression and suicidal thoughts
* Buspirone – An anti-anxiety medication.

In addition, Hydroxyzine, an antihistamine prescribed for anxiety, was also named in court documents as part of Clancy’s rotating regimen.

As Clancy’s attorney, prominent Massachusetts defense lawyer Kevin J. Reddington puts it, doctors prescribing so many powerful medications with well-known serious psychological hazards was “absolutely over the top.” They were, he alleges, effectively “turning her into a zombie.”

Patrick Clancy’s daughter Cora, son Dawson and son Callan were all strangled with exercise bands (GoFundMe)

Indeed, Clancy’s defense team maintains such extreme overmedication “triggered homicidal and suicidal thoughts, inducing postpartum psychosis that left her unable to be held criminally responsible for her actions.” Reddington likened her state to someone “being drugged without their knowledge, completely altering her mental state at the time of the killings.”

And of course, one more dynamic introduced when a patient is prescribed such an unusually large number of powerful psychiatric medications is the unknowable factor of drug interaction: How do all those medications, each with their own serious hazards, interact with each other and affect the struggling patient – especially when many of the drugs already come with black-box warnings of “suicidal ideation”?

As a result of all these concerns, NBC Boston reported: “Clancy filed a malpractice lawsuit in Norfolk Superior Court in February against several of her medical providers, alleging they failed to diagnose her bipolar disorder and subjected her to a ‘disorganized, uncoordinated course of polypharmacy’ that resulted in a psychotic break.”

Psych meds and ‘homicidal ideation’

The Clancy case is jarringly reminiscent of another infamous case involving a mother who killed all of her children while suffering from postpartum psychosis and taking an antidepressant drug whose manufacturer later conceded the medication could induce “homicidal ideation” – that is, murderous thoughts and feelings.

In 2001, Houston-area mom Andrea Yates drowned all five of her children – Noah, John, Paul, Luke and baby Mary, aged 7 years down to 6 months – in the family bathtub. Immediately after, Andrea called 911 and confessed, and when police arrived she opened the door and calmly told the officers, “I killed my kids.” Insisting inner voices commanded her to kill her children, she had become increasingly psychotic over the course of several years. At her 2006 murder re-trial (after a 2002 guilty verdict was overturned on appeal), Yates’ longtime friend Debbie Holmes testified: “She asked me if I thought Satan could read her mind and if I believed in demon possession.”

And neuropsychologist Dr. George Ringholz, after evaluating Yates for two days, recounted an experience she had after the birth of her first child: “What she described was feeling a presence … Satan … telling her to take a knife and stab her son Noah,” Ringholz said, adding that Yates’ delusion at the time of the bathtub murders was not only that she had to kill her children to save them, but that Satan had entered her and that she had to be executed in order to kill Satan.”

Yates had been taking the SNRI antidepressant Effexor. (SNRIs, short for serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, are similar to SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, in that both chemically elevate the levels of neurotransmitters in the brain). In November 2005, more than four years after Yates drowned her five children, Effexor manufacturer Wyeth Pharmaceuticals (since acquired by Pfizer) quietly added “homicidal ideation” to the drug’s list of “rare adverse events.”

“Rare”? Since the FDA defines “rare adverse event” as occurring in less than one in 1,000 people, and since that same year 19.2 million prescriptions for Effexor were filled in the U.S., statistically that means over 19,000 Americans might have experienced “homicidal ideation” as a result of taking just this one brand of antidepressant drug during that time period.

Clancy’s defense team is understandably using the Andrea Yates case as a key precedent in its argument in support of an insanity defense, since both cases revolve around mothers suffering from severe postpartum depression – and taking prescribed psychiatric medications with undisputed dangers of suicidal and even homicidal ideation. Reddington argues that Clancy – like Yates – was experiencing a complete detachment from reality and therefore merits being spared criminal responsibility due to severe mental illness.

Andrea Yates’ ex-husband, Rusty Yates, has opined that Lindsay Clancy, like his own former wife Andrea, should not face prison. Since 2007, Andrea Yates has resided at the Kerrville State Hospital in Kerrville, Texas, a low-security inpatient mental health facility.

Like Yates, Clancy also reportedly heard a demonic voice, telling “her husband and [a] defense-appointed psychologist” during one court appearance “that she had heard a man’s voice telling her to kill her kids because ‘it was her last chance,'” prosecutors said.

As the New York Post reported, Dr. Paul Zeizel, “a psychologist hired by Clancy’s lawyer to evaluate her, told the Daily Mail that it remains a ‘conundrum’ how she ended up being on more than a dozen prescription drugs, including Prozac and Seroquel, which her lawyer said can cause homicidal ideation as a side effect.”

1 in 6 American adults take antidepressants

Today, in 2026 America, according to the National Institutes of Health, a staggering 45 million people – about 1 in every 6 adults – are taking antidepressants, making them among the most prescribed drugs in the nation.

No surprise, then, that last August Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised to launch new studies into the effects of some antidepressant drugs – because of their use by so many who have turned out to be killers.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks in the Oval Office, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. (Official White House photo by Molly Riley)

Indeed, as this writer has previously documented, most of America’s most infamous and gruesome mass murderers over the years have been taking these controversial prescription drugs.

Last month, on May 5, Kennedy announced a “historic shift” in America’s mental healthcare policies, specifically an effort to “roll back the chronic overmedicalization that continues to plague millions of Americans.”

At a summit called “the Mental Health and Overmedicalization Summit” held in Washington, D.C., Kennedy said: “The United States does not just face a mental health crisis, we face a dependency crisis driven by over-medicalization. The data is clear: One in six American adults take an antidepressant. One in 10 children are on prescription medication for their mental health. Thirty percent of college students report using psychiatric medications in the past year. And in nursing homes, more than half of the residents are on prescribed antidepressants.”

According to the MAHA press release on the event, Kennedy said “HHS and four of its sub-agencies have issued a ‘Dear Colleague’ letter, directing healthcare providers across the country to expand their use of ‘non-pharmacologic’ treatment for mental health, and strengthen informed consent whereby patients are informed of a medication’s risks and side effects.”

Kennedy also told the audience that, “moving forward, federal health regulators will advance regulations that support evidence-based treatments that don’t rely on medication. Such alternatives to medicalization include psychotherapy, building social connections, behavioral strategies, sleep-focused care, exercise programs and dietary improvements.”

Kennedy’s more enlightened, multifaceted – and less medication-dependent – approach to mental health issues makes even more sense in light of a stunning, if largely unpublicized, revolution in understanding depression that has recently emerged. And that is, the entire operating theory on which modern antidepressant drug therapy has been based for the last half-century – namely, that depression is caused by abnormally low levels of brain neurotransmitters, which therefore need to be artificially elevated by means of SSRI and/or SNRI antidepressants – has been all but abandoned by today’s medical science worldwide in just the last few years.

As a recent article published by the National Institutes of Health acknowledges, “The traditional explanation of the pathogenesis of depression, centered on the imbalance of brain neurotransmitters (serotonin in the first place), is now judged unsatisfactory …” Or as University College London headlined its report: “No evidence that depression is caused by low serotonin levels, finds comprehensive review.”

If the long-lived but profoundly counter-intuitive medical orthodoxy that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain – a theory heavily promoted by major drug companies to promote antidepressant sales – is finally dead, perhaps that opens the door to a new, more reality-based era in which depression and other “mental illnesses” can be seen in a new light. Then, genuine help might finally be forthcoming for the millions of people living and suffering with what ultimately amount to troubles rooted not in a shortage of brain chemicals, but in psychological conflict, trauma and spiritual oppression – indeed, in the battle between good and evil raging inside every human being.