Why Has Lindsay Clancy Never Spoken To Police?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This is The Big Breakdown, a long look back at some of the biggest stories we're covering for you at the Hidden Killers Podcast and True Crime Today.
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:16)
Lindsay Clancy heard a voice. Not a feeling, not a dark thought. She couldn't shake a voice, loud, male, repetitious. According to her civil lawsuit, it said, This is your last chance. Kill the children so you can kill yourself. And then it said it again and again. And according to her account, she lost all control. That is not postpartum depression. That is not the baby blues. That is not a woman who was sad or overwhelmed or struggling to bond with a newborn. That's a woman whose brain manufactured a sound, a voice that did not exist in the physical world and presented it to her as indistinguishable from reality. She could not tell the difference between that voice and her husband talking to her from the next room. That is postpartum psychosis. And the distance between what that term actually means and what most people think it means is the distance between everything that matters in this case. We're going to go through this today. I welcome your thoughts in the comment section on SubStack and YouTube so we can continue discussing this there. Lindsay Clancy's murder trial begins with jury selection. That's going on right now as we record this in Plymouth Superior Court. She is charged with three counts of murder in the deaths of her children, Cora, five years old Dawson, three, Callan, eight months. She has not denied what happened. Her defense is not that she didn't do it. Her defense is that she was not in contact with reality when she did it. And the argument her legal team is making comes down to a medical condition that affects one in two women out of every thousand births. A condition so rare that most OBGYNs will go their entire career without seeing a case. A condition that the medical system has almost no standardized screening for. A condition where the person experiencing it often has no idea.
It's happening.
Here's why that matters to you, because when you have an opinion about Lindsay Clancy's guilt or not, because somebody you know, your sister, your daughter, your friend, your co-worker will have a baby. And if it happens to her, and you don't know what it looks like, you'll miss it. Her doctor might miss it too. Lindsay Clancy's doctors apparently did too. And I put that in air quotes.
So let me explain this in a way that doesn't require a medical degree, because the conversation around this case has collapsed three completely different diagnoses into one word, postpartum. And the confusion is doing real damage. Let's start with the baby blues. That's the most common postpartum experience. Up to 85% of new mothers go through some version of it. Mood swings, crying easily, feeling overwhelmed. It usually resolves on its own within two weeks. It is normal. It does not involve any disconnect from reality. This is not that. Then there actually is kind of the next step of postpartum depression. That is a clinical diagnosis about one in seven women experience it. Persistent sadness, hopelessness, fatigue, difficulty, bonding with the baby. It can be debilitating. It's also treatable with therapy, medication and support. And it does not involve hallucinations. A woman with postpartum depression knows where she is. She knows who her baby is. She knows what's real. She is suffering, but she's operating inside the same reality as everyone else. Postpartum psychosis is something else entirely. It is not a more severe form of postpartum depression. It's like in its own other arena. So to say, well, it's just a stronger version of it, really completely discounts what it is. It's like saying in orange, you know, the food you eat is the same as a Nike, the shoe you use. No, they're really not at all remotely the same things. It's not the next step on the spectrum. It's a separate psychiatric emergency with a different set of symptoms and a fundamentally different relationship to reality. And the single most important thing I can tell you about it is this. The person experiencing it usually does not know it is happening. Think about that. You have a complete break from reality, hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, command voices telling you to do things, and not know that anything is wrong because the hallucinations feel real. They sound real. They look real. Your brain is not giving you a warning label. Your brain is telling you that the voice you hear is as legitimate as traffic noise or your baby crying. There's no internal signal that says that's a hallucination. The whole point of a hallucination is that your brain treats it as genuine sensory input. Cleveland Clinic describes it as a condition where a person cannot tell the difference between a hallucination and something that is truly happening. The delusions, beliefs held with absolute conviction are so strong that no amount of evidence will change them. A woman with postpartum psychosis might believe her baby is possessed. She might believe someone is trying to poison her child through her breast milk. She might believe God has given her a command and she holds those beliefs with the same certainty that you hold the belief that you're watching me do this right now or listening to me tell you this right now. She's not choosing to believe them. Her brain has made them facts.