Social media is filled with Reels and posts about the ongoing murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, a US-based nurse accused of killing her three children in January 2023. It has drawn global attention to a rare but severe maternal mental health condition: postpartum psychosis.
Prosecutors argue that Clancy intentionally killed her children, while her defence maintains that she was experiencing psychosis and was not criminally responsible for her actions. Both sides agree that she caused the deaths; the central legal question is her state of mind at the time.
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The baby was rescued by a family member. “In India, parents, in-laws and relatives often share responsibility for the mother and baby. In 2025, a woman in Uttar Pradesh’s Moradabad allegedly placed her 15-day-old son inside a refrigerator.
This may help the mother get adequate sleep and, importantly, behavioural changes may be noticed earlier,” says Dr Sharma. “However, we can’t conclude that postpartum psychosis itself is less common in India because of family support.”
What happened in the Lindsay Clancy case?
Former labour and delivery nurse Lindsay Clancy is accused of killing her daughter Cora, 5, son Dawson, 3, and eight-month-old son Callan at the family’s Massachusetts home while her husband had stepped out to get food and medicine on January 24, 2023. As per reports, she was prescribed 13 psychiatric medications in the months before the killings. The case has received widespread global coverage, with media outlets calling it ‘America’s saddest murder trial’. Lindsay then jumped from a second-storey window in a suicide attempt and was left paralysed from the waist down. Evidence has shown that she had experienced insomnia, anxiety, numbness and suicidal thoughts and had sought help from multiple providers.
Her defence has also argued that she was “overmedicated and underserved”. The trial has also heard testimony about gaps in communication between providers assessing her mental health, including clinicians who said they had not initially viewed her as presenting a high risk.
Testimony during the trial has scrutinised the psychiatric care Clancy received before the deaths.
