Lindsay Clancy: A Siren in the Theater
I cannot think of a violation of the natural order more extreme than a mother murdering her own children. It is so unthinkable (especially to those of us with children of our own) that it seems to threaten the very fabric of reality. No wonder society reacts—via the legal system—by seeking to punish the perpetrator of this unfathomable crime. Maybe if we lock Lindsay Clancy away in prison, or send her to the electric chair, then we will have removed along with her the tear in the fabric of the world.
Faced with a serious rupture in the natural order, people naturally want to do something about it. We want to find a culprit, a cause, a reason. We want a way to make sense of what has happened, and thereby to restore (at least in our own minds) the order that has been violated.
This primal impulse disguises itself in language of justice, deterrence, and rule of law, but it is a flimsy disguise. No punishment we could devise comes anywhere close to the hell that has already visited Lindsay Clancy, the images burned into her brain, the total ruin of her life, agony without end. “Every day is the worst day of my life,” she told her husband when they reestablished contact. What arrogance would apply conventional notions of justice to such a crime? As for “deterrence,” come on. Does anyone really think that this woman made a calculated assessment of the pros and cons of killing her children and, deciding that the benefits outweighed the risks, went ahead with it?
The reflex of punishment, posing as the restoration of a ruptured natural order, distracts us from the desperately important question: How could such a thing happen? The safe and convenient answer is that it was a random aberration, localized in the person of a Lindsay Clancy. In that case our reflex is sensible, and executing her would be just. Justice, after all, means something like, “to put things to rights” or “to restore rightness.” Get rid of Lindsay and we have gotten ridden of the problem, neat and tidy.
If, on the other hand, the Clancy case is not an isolated aberration but a symptom of a society that has itself deviated from the natural order, then removing Lindsay Clancy from society would be like throwing out the smoke alarm in hopes of putting out the fire.
Lindsay Clancy is not a faulty smoke alarm. The house is on fire. What she shows us is too serious to dismiss with facile explanations like faulty brain chemistry or moral degeneracy. To understand it, first we must ask: What is it like to be Lindsay Clancy?
We might expect that the explanation involved some kind of horrific abuse in childhood that she reenacted upon the next generation. That would be a relief, because it would preserve, at least to a degree, the natural order. We could understand the crime, and fit it into a sensible story that sequesters “wrong” into an identifiable, socially condemned, causal category (child abuse), leaving normalized institutions of modern parenting, education, and medicine unsullied. But that is not the story.
According to journalistic accounts, Lindsay Clancy was a happy, outgoing, fun-loving girl from a normal family. There is no evidence of abuse or dysfunction in her childhood. Neighbors described her as respectful and kind. She was a cheerleader and an athlete, a babysitter, an honors student, and aspired to motherhood and to working with babies in the medical field.
It is one thing if a traumatized, marginal, abnormal person who is not a full member of society commits the most horrible crime imaginable. It is quite another when the perpetrator emerges from the fully normalized good life. Then, it calls into question the goodness we have normalized.
I have hesitated to comment on the Lindsay Clancy trial, in part because I’m busy writing a book, but also because the issue has become polarized along left-right political identities. What I am about to say is unintelligible to either side, both of which will doubtless assume I am on the other. The right generally thinks this is a matter of rule of law, deterrence, and justice—a viewpoint I have already discussed. As for the left, it generally treats it as a tragic outbreak of “postpartum psychosis,” a matter to be handled by trained psychiatric professionals rather than judges and prisons, as if postpartum depression were some random pathology that visits certain unfortunate victims in a system where a “healthy” person is totally fine. This narrative normalizes the conditions that create postpartum psychosis in the first place.
If our society is basically sound, then if you are unhappy the problem must be you: your genes, your hormones, your unprocessed trauma, your moral failings, and so on. And we are developing treatments for all those things! Someday, thanks to progress in modern psychiatry, we will all be well-adjusted.
According to her husband Patrick, Lindsay’s psychological problems began after she had her first baby—but not right away. The problems started when her maternity leave ended and she was supposed to go back to work. “She had a hard time being separated from them,” Patrick told the jury in her trial.
Well, there are pills for that. Lindsay was on all kinds of pills—30 prescriptions for 13 different medications in 2022 and 2023, in various combinations and doses comprising SSRIs, anti-psychotics, mood stabilizers, sedatives, and benzos. This was not a person who had fallen through the cracks of the mental health system and wasn’t receiving “psychiatric care.”
However, I would like to go beyond the obvious explanation of iatrogenic psychosis. Certainly, these medications alter brain chemistry. Many have not even been tested in combinations like Lindsay’s took. And yes, despite the pharmaceutical establishment’s efforts to deny it, SSRIs in particular are linked to psychosis, homicidal and suicidal ideation, and other severe pathologies. But there is a bigger story here, of which the over-medicalization of the mentally ill—and the whole category called “mental illness”—is just one expression.
Shifting the identity of the bad guy from Lindsay’s moral turpitude or brain chemistry to the system of medical psychiatry still applies the same template of blame, preserving the larger systems from which the culprit is distinguished, and leading to insufficiently radical solutions.
The medicalization of psychiatry enjoys powerful support from the moneyed interests that profit from it, particularly the pharmaceutical companies. Greed, though, cannot explain the whole of it. I know several people who have returned from the hell of medical psychiatry—first one pill, then another to counter its side-effects, then a higher dose, then a third pill, then a fourth, culminating in institutionalization—who confirm the disturbing fact that all (or nearly all) of the doctors who prescribed these chemicals were kind, compassionate, intelligent people with good intentions. That’s true across the board, including pharma companies, investment firms, regulatory agencies—everyone, in fact, who keep an inhumane system running. All are puppets of systems and ideologies that most people take for granted.
Imagine you are one of those professionals. Here comes a young mother with postpartum depression. She is distraught at leaving her baby in day care with strangers 8 or 10 hours a day. What can you do for her? Probably you do not question the rightness of day care. You might think that it is a privilege that should be extended to those who cannot currently afford it, so that they too can liberate themselves from the drudgery of parenting and build meaningful careers. To say instead, “Of course you are sad, of course you are anxious. It is crazy to put your baby in the hands of strangers all day. It violates your maternal instincts,” would contradict an entire value system and worldview. It would be to admit that our notion of progress is backward. It would be to reject what society has normalized and validated, including quite possibly your own profession. Such cognitive dissonance is hard to bear. It is much easier to locate the pathology in the patient, not the society, and treat her with whatever tools your education has bestowed you.
Nor can we blame the mothers and fathers who put their baby in day care. Besides the low social status of stay-at-home moms (and dads), pure economic necessity drives reluctant parents into the workforce even when they would rather be full-time parents. A further overlooked factor, perhaps the most important, is that the character of parenting itself has changed with the unraveling of community, making it into a lonely drama played out inside the nuclear family box. I was a stay-at-home dad for a few years. I didn’t believe in day care, but all the other kids were there, so there was no one for my children to play with. My life was a constant search for play dates, which were a welcome relief from the long, long days of reading Hop on Pop for the hundredth time, playing with blocks, packing Philip in the car seat to go to the supermarket, and so on. That is no way to live. It isn’t like that in less “modern” cultures. People are always around—aunts and uncles, cousins, grandmas—to make parenting into a community endeavor.
Those years as a stay-at-home dad then as a single dad were some of the hardest of my life (and most treasured too). I was acutely aware of my low social status as I pushed the shopping cart, hearing perhaps from classmates who had just made partner at McKinsey or founded their fourth company. Maybe I could have accelerated my future career as a whatever-I-am-today by putting the kids in full time day care, but that would have broken my heart. There was no way out. I was depressed, anxious, and restless.
Surely there were pills for all those conditions. Implicitly, the pills say: The problem is not your circumstances, the problem is you. They make it easier, maybe, to tolerate the circumstances, but they do not change them.
Maybe if I’d taken pills I too would have descended into psychosis like Lindsay Clancy. Maybe I was saved from her fate simply by my inveterate hostility to the mainstream medical system. At bottom, maybe I am fundamentally the same as she is. Maybe we all are. Maybe none of us is made of better stuff than any other.
Let us return now to the theme I opened with: something must be done. The horrific murder of three beautiful, happy children by their own mother is like a siren going off in a concert hall. It cannot be tuned out. (Certainly, you might say there are many sirens sounding right now, social, political, ecological, and we do tune them out. We get used to them. Well, here is another siren, and it disturbs people who have tuned out the others.) The basic impulse to do something is authentic. We must do something. We cannot rest easy if we do not. But what?
What do we do when we understand that the problem isn’t just a lapse in law and order, nor Lindsay’s brain chemistry, nor the psychiatric profession or Big Pharma, nor any single thing we can identify, but that it is in fact the entire system we live in? The wrongness cannot be waved off as a problem with a bad individual, set of individuals, or isolable institution. It is everywhere.
That realization has the power to stop us in our tracks. That is good. Our “tracks”—our habitual ways of addressing problems, our attributions of cause—are leading us in circles.
To stop in one’s tracks is not a permanent state. It is an interruption, after which a new level of awareness informs choices that had been automatic. It allows intention to replace reflex.
The result may well be to take some kind of action in the Lindsay Clancy affair, but it will not draw from a false attribution of cause, and it will contribute to the transformation of… of what? Of everything.
Some observers have criticized the media frenzy surrounding this case as a distraction from far more serious issues facing humanity. Sure, they say, it was a tragedy, but it pales in comparison to what is happening in Gaza or the Amazon or the DRC. It is insignificant compared to the threat of global ecosystem collapse, AI takeover, or nuclear war. Yet the Clancy case gets more media attention than any of these.
This critique misses an important point. All of these humanitarian disasters and world-threatening situations are expressions of the same system and narrative that reveals itself so starkly in the Lindsay Clancy case. How does a system change? How does a mythology change? It happens when enough of us “do something.” Every expression of the system is a leverage point to change it, and its most heinous expressions thrust us outside the usual tacit acceptance. We may not know what to do to change everything—it is best not to pretend to know—but each of us will be faced with at least one thing that gets under our skin and calls us into action.
You read about the Lindsay Clancy case and you think, something must be done. Hark to that call! Understand, though, that what is to be done might be whale conservation or refugee work or medical reform or hospice work or serving plant medicine. What does that have to do with the encompassing civilizational illness that the Clancy case reveals? You need not explain. You will know you are taking action. Your life will make sense.
What then is to be done about Lindsay Clancy? Recognize her as a victim of a vast set of circumstances. Understand that but for the grace of God, it could have been me in those circumstances. Know that there is something of her in all of us. Then, the only thing you can wish for her is that she be delivered from Hell. Touch in to her pain for even a second—it is like touching a red-hot burner. For her the pain isn’t just for a second, it is endless. Her act is irrevocable. There is no escape from her hell. May God have mercy. May we all have mercy.
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