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The System That Failed Lindsay Clancy & Killed Her Kids

The System That Failed Lindsay Clancy & Killed Her Kids

Last updated on: September 1, 2026 at 11:54 pm by Jeff Hood

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The System That Failed Lindsay Clancy & Killed Her Kids 2026-09-01T23:54:10-06:00 Jeff Hood

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Lindsay Clancy & The Wrong Question

As of this evening, twelve jurors in Plymouth, Massachusetts have not reached a verdict on Lindsay Clancy.

Maybe they’re concentrating on the wrong question.

The question is not only what Lindsay Clancy did.

The question is what happened before she did it.

Start where the story actually starts. Not when her children were found dead on January 24, 2023. Start in September of 2022…when a labor and delivery nurse in Duxbury began to deteriorate. She worked in labor and delivery. She knew what new mothers looked like. She was the professional. She was the one who was supposed to know.

And still…when her own mind began to break…the system had almost nothing for her.

Follow the timeline the trial laid bare. The insomnia that would not lift. The anxiety that swallowed her whole. The intrusive thoughts…arriving like strangers in her own head…telling her things no mother wants to say out loud. She said them out loud anyway. That is the part we need to sit with. She told people. She told her husband. She told her doctors. She kept asking for help…again and again.

And what did help look like in the richest country in the history of the world?

A prescription. Then another. Then another. Her husband testified to roughly a dozen medications across those months. It was like pouring buckets of water on top of a drowning woman. Pills for sleep. Pills for anxiety. Pills for depression. Pills to manage the pills. When the medications did not work…a hospital stay. When the hospital stay ended…discharge papers. A follow-up appointment. Outside referrals. It is a story other mothers have been telling us for years.

Less than three weeks after she walked out of a psychiatric hospital…her three children were dead, and she was shattered on the frozen ground beneath an open window.

We keep asking whether Lindsay Clancy was criminally responsible for what she did.

Why is nobody asking about our responsibility?

What Help for Someone Like Lindsay Clancy Looks Like in America

Here is what the mental health system offers a new mother in crisis in America.

It offers a six-week checkup. One appointment. Often the only scheduled contact she will have with any provider after pregnancy, childbirth and the profound physiological upheaval that follows. It offers a screening questionnaire, if she’s lucky. A piece of paper asking if she has thought of harming herself, handed to a woman who knows that the honest answer might mean someone takes her baby.

For some mothers, that is the trap. Tell the truth and risk being treated like a criminal. Stay silent and drown. The system does not just fail to catch postpartum illness. The system teaches too many women to hide it.

It offers general psychiatric wards. Built for everyone and no one. A postpartum mother can be separated from her infant at the exact moment separation feels like death. She may be treated by clinicians who have never been trained in perinatal psychiatry at all. In the United Kingdom, a mother in psychiatric crisis can be admitted with her baby to a dedicated mother-and-baby unit. There are dozens of them. In the United States, dedicated mother-and-baby psychiatric units remain extraordinarily rare. We are the wealthiest nation on earth, and we have functionally decided that the shattered minds of new mothers are not worth a building.

It offers emergency rooms with hours-long waits. Waitlists for psychiatrists stretching months while postpartum psychosis can bloom in days. It offers medications repeatedly swapped and stacked because trial and error is cheaper than expertise. It offers discharge. Always discharge. The bed is the most expensive thing in the hospital, and the mother is the easiest thing to send home.

Postpartum psychosis strikes something like one or two mothers out of every thousand births. It is rare. It is also a psychiatric emergency…as lethal as a heart attack…with real risk of suicide and, far more rarely, harm to children. We know this. The literature knows this. The obstetricians know this. And still a nurse…a nurse…spiraled for four months through hospitals and prescriptions and appointments in one of the great medical corridors of the world…and no one stopped it.

The system did not have to predict murder. It had to recognize a psychiatric emergency.

Rare does not mean unforeseeable.

If a woman presented four months of worsening cardiac symptoms to that many providers and dropped dead in her kitchen, we would call it malpractice. We would call for investigations. Because it was her mind, we call for a verdict.

There Is No Monster

Do not misunderstand. I am not neutral. If Lindsay Clancy is guilty…what does that make the system that watched her deteriorate? A conviction that cages her while that system walks away untouched would be a final act of malpractice. It would punish the patient for the disease we refused to treat. There is a word for that. The word is evil.

And this essay is not, God forbid, an attempt to look past the dead. Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. They deserved long lives and gentle deaths at the far end of them. Their names should be spoken with reverence forever. Whatever failed…failed them first and worst.

But that is precisely the point. The children were not only failed by their mother’s broken mind. They were failed by every system that let her mind stay broken. A mother’s mental health care is not self-care. It is child protection. Every dollar we refuse to spend on perinatal psychiatry, every mother-baby unit we refuse to build, every screening we skip, every honest answer we punish…is a gamble we place with children’s lives. Almost always, the gamble quietly pays off. The mother suffers alone. The family limps through. Nobody makes the news. And then one night in Massachusetts…it doesn’t.

The mass of women standing outside the courthouse in pink supporting Lindsay Clancy understand something the commentators don’t. They are not there because they think what happened is acceptable. They are there because they have felt the edge of it. The thoughts they never told anyone. The screening form they lied on. The doctor who patted their hand. The night they sat in the nursery and did not trust themselves. They look at Lindsay Clancy, and they do not see an alien. They see the far end of a road they have stood on…a road with no guardrails because we have never built any.

Mental illness is the last disease we still treat as a character flaw. Maternal mental illness is the last disease we treat as a character flaw in the people we claim to cherish most. We put mothers on pedestals precisely so we don’t have to build them hospitals. We sanctify motherhood so we can neglect mothers. Then when that neglect ends in horror…we reach for the oldest word we have.

Monster.

The monster story is cheap. It asks nothing of us. Fix nothing. Fund nothing. Change nothing. Just cage the monster and go back to sleep. But the mothers in pink are wide awake. They are telling us the truth we all need to hear…

There is no monster.

There is an illness we refuse to treat.

There are mothers we refuse to hear.

There is a system we refuse to build.

Though the Clancy children are dead, they still speak.

They are demanding we reform the system that failed them and their mother.

Catholic

Politics and Religion

About The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood

The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood is a Catholic priest (Old Catholic), theologian, and nationally recognized activist based in North Little Rock, Arkansas. A spiritual advisor to death row inmates across the country, Dr. Hood has accompanied more people to their executions than any other advisor in the U.S., including the first-ever nitrogen hypoxia execution in 2024. His work sits at the intersection of justice, radical compassion, and public theology. Dr. Hood holds advanced degrees from Auburn, Emory, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, University of Alabama, Creighton, and Brite Divinity School, among others. He also earned a PhD in metaphysical theology and founded The New Theology School, where he serves as Dean and Professor of Prophetic Theology. Author of over 100 books—including the award-winning The Courage to Be Queer—Dr. Hood’s writings and activism have been featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, NPR, CNN, and more. A frequent collaborator with men on death row, he sees theology as a shared, liberative act. Dr. Hood has served on the leadership teams of organizations like the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. His activism has earned multiple awards, including recognition from PFLAG and the Next Generation Action Network. On July 7, 2016, Dr. Hood led the Dallas protest against police brutality that ended in tragedy. His actions that night saved lives, and his story is now archived in the Dallas Public Library. A father of five, husband to Emily, and friend to the incarcerated, Dr. Hood rejects institutionalism in favor of a theology rooted in people, presence, and prophetic witness. You can read more about the author here.

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