The Mass-Psychosis of the Lindsey Clancy Case

By Easton Martin | August 20, 2026

Lindsay Clancy is accused of doing something almost impossible to comprehend. On January 24, 2023, the Massachusetts mother strangled her three children, five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old Callan, with exercise bands inside the family’s Duxbury home. She then attempted suicide by jumping from a window, leaving herself paralyzed.

Now, more than three years later, Clancy is on trial for their murders. Her defense argues that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, bipolar disorder and the effects of an extensive psychiatric medication regimen. Her attorneys have presented evidence that she experienced hallucinations, suicidal thoughts and a deteriorating mental state in the months before the killings. They argue that she was not criminally responsible because she could not understand the nature or wrongfulness of what she was doing.

Postpartum psychosis is real, and it can be devastating. It would be foolish to pretend otherwise. The medical treatment Clancy received also deserves serious scrutiny. Her family has described warning signs before the killings, and her husband has filed a wrongful death lawsuit alleging negligence by some of the medical providers who treated her.

But something else has happened around this case that is deeply disturbing.Large numbers of people online have gone beyond expressing sympathy for a mentally ill woman. They have begun defending Lindsay Clancy herself. Some have tried to construct elaborate explanations for why what happened was not really her fault. Others have turned her into a tragic figure, almost a victim of the story rather than the mother who killed three children.

A GoFundMe campaign for Clancy’s parents had raised more than $835,000 from more than 25,000 donors as of August 18. Supporters have cited mental illness and postpartum psychosis as reasons for donating. Pink-clad supporters have also gathered outside the courthouse during the trial.

There is nothing inherently wrong with having compassion for someone suffering from severe mental illness. What is disturbing is when compassion becomes moral confusion.

That confusion has even caused disagreement among prominent conservative commentators.

Matt Walsh recently argued on X that much of what people call postpartum depression can be connected to the enormous demands of caring for children and suggested that Clancy’s case involved selfishness rather than simply a medical condition. He later criticized people for “celebrating and canonizing” a woman who killed her children.

Ben Shapiro pushed back, arguing that postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis are not the same thing. He criticized the tendency to conflate ordinary postpartum struggles with a condition involving hallucinations and voices allegedly telling someone to commit murder.

Postpartum psychosis can be acknowledged without accepting the idea that it automatically erases moral responsibility. Clancy may have been desperately sick. The circumstances surrounding her treatment may deserve investigation. People around her may have missed warning signs or made serious mistakes, but none of that changes what happened to those children.

Those children will never grow up, they will never graduate from high school. They will never get married, have children of their own, build careers or experience the ordinary joys of life.

They were robbed of their entire futures, and yet, that fact seems to disappear whenever the conversation becomes too focused on understanding the person who committed the crime.

Were people around Lindsay Clancy potentially to blame for failing to recognize how serious her condition had become? Sure. Was the medical system potentially responsible for giving her an enormous amount of psychiatric medication without adequately addressing what was happening to her? That deserves to be investigated. Did she genuinely suffer from postpartum psychosis? That is ultimately for the evidence and the court to determine.

But the masses coming to her defense, especially in the manner they are doing so, should make people uncomfortable.This case also exposes something unhealthy in modern true crime culture.

The true crime podcast movement has created an audience that wants every horrific crime to become a complicated psychological puzzle. People dissect the killer’s childhood, relationships, medications, personality and motives until the crime itself almost disappears. Everything has to become a dramatic, beautifully tragic story. The killer cannot simply be evil. There has to be a reason, there has to be an explanation. There has to be some hidden trauma, some societal failure or some psychological mechanism that makes the whole thing easier to digest.

That instinct can become dangerous, and in fact, can be quite evil. Sometimes we ought to just let evil be evil and not try to justify it.

That does not mean every mentally ill person who commits a crime is automatically morally equivalent to a completely rational murderer. Mental illness can profoundly affect a person’s ability to understand reality, and the legal system rightly takes that into account.

But there is a difference between understanding a crime and romanticizing it.There is a difference between explaining someone’s actions and excusing them. There is a difference between recognizing that someone was sick and turning that person into a sympathetic hero.

The court will ultimately decide the question of criminal responsibility. The evidence deserves to be examined carefully, and the circumstances surrounding Clancy’s mental health treatment deserve serious scrutiny.

But morally, the focus should remain where it belongs.