Lindsay Clancy Did Have Agency

I’m sure I’m not the only person disturbed by the Lindsay Clancy trial.

The case itself is disturbing enough. Three innocent children are dead, strangled to death by their own mother in the basement of their home while their father went to run errands.

Dawson, Cora, and Callan are their names.

Three beautiful children lost to the entire world forever. Dawson wanted to grow up to be a firefighter. Cora really loved princesses. Callan didn’t have a chance to grow up and dream. May they rest in peace.

At first I thought this was strictly a tragic case of poor mental health care (I have since changed my mind based on the facts of the case), and I wrote about what I did to put an action plan in place should I slip into postpartum depression after the birth of our second child.

It included things like telling a close neighbor of mine that I had a problem with my first, and I also told another close friend. It included lining up and developing a relationship with a psychiatrist who could closely monitor me after birth. I also set up an appointment four weeks after birth, right around when my husband was going to return to work. I told my OBGYN team. I also discussed breastfeeding-safe medication with both my OBGYN team and a pediatrician.

My first issue with Lindsay Clancy was why she seemed to be bouncing around and switching providers while in the midst of a crisis. Especially an entirely predictable crisis given her history with postpartum anxiety with both Dawson and Cora.

Why did she not have a psychiatrist picked out ahead of time? After all, she was a labor and delivery nurse. And the issues that children of mothers with postpartum mental health issues are well documented. Things like speech delays and even attachment disorders are much more likely in children with mothers who have untreated postpartum mental health issues.

And while speech and language therapists are wonderful people who do great work, giving your kid attachment disorders can go on to give your children serious disruptions in their social relationships well into adulthood. The infant-mother dyad is one of the most foundational relationships a child has, and it sets the stage for the rest of their life.

In other words, if you’re not willing as a mom to care about yourself because you’re just far too depressed to do so, surely you can muster up the courage to get yourself together for your own children.

If I know this, as a lay person, surely a labor and delivery nurse would know this and know it more intimately than I do. After all, she was on the front lines of maternal healthcare.

And as more details about this case have come to light, the less sympathetic I have become.

She was offered an inpatient medication management program and a general mental health partial hospitalization program at the Women’s and Infants Hospital in December of 2022, and she was told to follow up about those treatment options with her psychiatrist, Dr. Tufts, but she failed to do so, and instead continued with just her short visits with Dr. Tufts.

Furthermore, there was zero sign of any psychosis before the incident; she only heard the voice during the murders, one time. Never once did she tell her doctors that she was having thoughts of harming the children.

She did manage to tell her husband and her mother, though. People point to this to state she was “crying out for help,” but I find it convenient that she told the very people who had no power or ability to help her.

She never told her doctors about her thoughts of harming the kids in spite of the fact that she had an appointment with Dr. Tufts the day before the murders.

You would think, given that this is your psychiatrist, that mentioning the fact that you had thoughts of harming the children would be something you would tell her. Yet neither Jollotta nor Tufts were told. Nor did she tell anyone when she voluntarily checked herself in at the McLean Center.

I guess when I look at all these facts laid out before me, I have a question: What more could’ve possibly been done to help Lindsay Clancy?

And for those who want to blame her family, how long should Patrick and her family have had to babysat Lindsay to prevent the unthinkable, especially when she lied to virtually everyone in her life about her mental state? Should Patrick have known she was lying and never left her alone with the kids despite her outward appearance of health?

He thought she was healthy. She just met with her doctor the day before. He was getting some food and MiraLAX.

When I think about what more could’ve been done to help Lindsay, the only things I can think of would be to roll back HIPAA laws so that Patrick was in full communication with her doctors, and the moment she expressed any thoughts about harming the kids, allowed her husband to involuntarily commit her for an indefinite period of time until she was no longer mentally ill.

You know, like the good old days in the 1950s.

I appreciate the conversation surrounding mental health, but I don’t appreciate the idea that Lindsay didn’t have any agency. Lindsay was in full control of her healthcare, her doctors, and what medications she took, and she had access to some of the best healthcare in the country.

There is no doubt, based on her medical records, that she was having serious problems finding the right medications and was mentally ill (although I don’t believe the claim of “command hallucinations”).

But it was up to her to utilize the resources given to her. I firmly believe an inpatient stay to figure out her medications would’ve probably saved her children.

Instead, she chose to remain in the home, send Patrick on an errand, and she strangled her children to death.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.