Published: 11:56 BST, 29 August 2026 | Updated: 17:12 BST, 30 August 2026
There is a murder trial currently gripping the US. At its centre is a 36-year-old mother, paralysed from the waist down after jumping from an upstairs window – occasionally sobbing as a jury hears how before she jumped, she’d strangled her three young children.
Lindsay Clancy, a former nurse from Massachusetts, is accused of killing five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old Callan in the basement of their family home in 2023 – she then jumped from a window in an apparent suicide attempt that left her paraplegic.
The defence does not dispute that Lindsay killed her children, but argues she is not guilty by reason of insanity.
Much of its case centres on whether Lindsay was suffering from postpartum psychosis, a rare and severe condition that can occur after childbirth.
But another strand runs through the evidence: the possible role of the psychiatric medications she was prescribed beforehand.
Lindsay was originally prescribed the SSRI sertraline in September 2022, three months after the birth of her youngest son, to help with anxiety and insomnia as her maternity leave was ending.
The dose was increased to 50mg after a week and she suffered dramatic side-effects – going 48 hours without sleep, racing thoughts and worsening anxiety.
Although she came off it the next day, over the following four months – from October 2022 to January 2023 – she was prescribed 13 different psychiatric drugs, including antidepressants, antipsychotics, benzodiazepines and sleeping medication.
Her defence lawyer, Kevin Reddington, had asked the judge to let the jury consider ‘involuntary intoxication’, arguing that the prescribed medication and the effects of stopping it could have contributed to her state of mind. The judge turned down his request.
Lindsay Clancy, a former nurse from Massachusetts, is accused of killing five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old Callan in the basement of their family home in 2023
But the drugs remained part of the defence case: In his closing argument, Kevin Reddington blamed the tragedy in part on ‘the damn medicine and the lousy medical care that she got’.
What happened inside the Clancy home on the evening of January 24, 2023, is not disputed. What was happening inside Lindsay’s mind is at the heart of the trial.
Lindsay has repeatedly said that after her husband Patrick left the house, she heard a loud male voice commanding: ‘This is your last chance. Kill the children so you can kill yourself’, an account she gave to psychiatric experts who evaluated her, and to others, including her husband after she killed them.
She describes a force coming over her and entering a dissociative, ‘dream-like state’: ‘I lost all control. My body started acting without any control on my part.’
