Last Friday I joined Newsmax’s National Report to discuss the Lindsay Clancy trial, which ended in a mistrial after the jury deadlocked for a seventh day over whether she was criminally responsible for the deaths of her three children.
There is no reliable, definitive test that proves psychosis the way an EKG proves a heart problem—we assess the mind through a careful reconstruction of history, prior postpartum episodes, and family risk. But the harder truth sits outside the courtroom. A case this public and this prolonged, now facing a retrial, has a chilling effect on everyone in the justice system, hardening resistance to reintegrating people found not guilty by reason of insanity even when they are deemed safe.
And it reaches far beyond one family. Postpartum psychosis is rare—perhaps one or two in a thousand births—but it is real, it is devastating, and it is preventable with adequate prenatal and postpartum care. That Lindsay Clancy did not receive that care, in Boston, at a major academic medical center, should alarm us. This is a public-health failure as much as a legal one.