Lindsay Clancy's Doctors Had the Answer and Did Nothing

**Tony Brueski** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:11)
Lindsay Clancy delivered babies for a living. She was a labor and delivery nurse. She spent her shifts walking other women through the hardest hours of their lives. She went home to three children of her own, less than three weeks before she killed those children, and the psychiatric hospital looked at her and sent her home. Both sides at her trial agree she was mentally ill. Despite one side at the beginning, not so much. But by the time we got to closings, it was like, whoa, whoa, you've always said she was, didn't we? Remember that, guys, we always did, huh? Yeah.
At least that's where it stands now. The prosecution says so and her own defense says so. So that, I guess, is not a fight anymore. The fight is whether Lindsay Clancy was so far gone, she didn't know what she was doing was wrong. And while that question sits with 12 jurors, a harder one hangs over the entire case.
How does a woman end up inside a psychiatric hospital, get evaluated by trained professionals who know exactly what postpartum illness looks like, walk out the door, and three weeks later, her three children are dead? A woman named Meghan Cliffel heard about this case and didn't ask that question. She already knew the answer. Cliffel survived the same illness in 2015 and came out the other side. She looked at Lindsay Clancy and said, That could have been me. The illness has a name. Most people have never heard it explained. And every day that that stays true is a day the system is choosing to let mothers fall through the floor. Postpartum psychosis, it's maybe one in two mothers out of every thousand births. It's rare and it's a single most dangerous psychiatric emergency.
A new mother can phase. The name works against it. Doctors will tell you it's really a mood disorder closer to bipolar illness than the word psychosis. A mother in the middle of it doesn't look like she's lost her mind. She looks exhausted and anxious and a little off, which means she looks like half of new mothers you've ever met.
The mothers most at risk aren't a mystery, the history of bipolar disorder is the single biggest warning sign, along with the psychotic episode after an earlier both or sleep loss deep enough to tip into mania. The medical community has known this for decades. They screen for gestational diabetes, they screen for preeclampsia, and they send four out of five mothers home without asking a single question about their mental health. It moves fast, in most cases, within four weeks of birth right when the woman is already shattered from no sleep and everyone around her is watching the baby instead of watching her. The early signs don't scream. She gets paranoid or she stops sleeping for days. The people who love her chalk it up to new mom stress because no one in the health care system ever told them what to look for. That's the trap a mother in this state can arrive at the belief through. Though it feels like careful reasoning that her children are in danger and the only way to protect them is to end their lives. That's the delusion the defense experts described in Clancy's case. It's the same one that drove Andrea Yates 20 years earlier. From the inside, it doesn't register as madness. It registers as the only rational choice left. Well, how can that be? I've never experienced that. Consider yourself lucky. Meghan Cliffel described her own episode that way, acting logically inside a reality that's gone completely false. One of the analogies I've been giving on this is a member of Compass, the old school, actual Compass, not on your phone, magnetically controlled. Magnetic compasses, if you've never used one, they point true north or they should anyway, if your compass is working right and there's nothing else affecting where the magnetic pull is. But if you know there are certain places, certain conditions, certain objects, certain things you can have around that can affect the way the compass is pointing. And if you're relying on the compass for the direction you're supposed to go, you're going to believe north is north, south is south, and that should help guide you, right? So obviously, this is not as extreme as murdering your children. But let's just take for a second an understanding here of what one may be operating under. You're out hiking, you have your compass, you don't know where you are, you're relying on it. I wouldn't be in that situation in the first place. Let's just pretend you are, okay? Get your compass out. You're supposed to go north to get to the campsite. That's where everybody's at. That's where you need to get to. Pull it out. Oh, it looks like I'm going north. Continue on your day.