Lindsay Clancy: a Chance for Justice against Overmedicating

     This Monday the jury trial of Lindsay Clancy will begin in Duxbury, Massachusetts. She is charged with three counts of first degree murder for killing her three young children on January 24, 2023. She has pleaded not guilty.

     Her defense will show that Lindsay was suffering from overmedication, and thus she should be acquitted because she had been “involuntarily intoxicated” by the broad cocktail of psychiatric medications she had been prescribed. If she is not to be acquitted, her lawyer will argue that she should be found not guilty by reason of insanity caused by the tsunami of medications she had been given.

     David Carmichael, manager of the Know Your Drugs global awareness campaign, recounts the full history of Lindsay’s descent into her vile overmedication in his article on this week’s Mad in America website. It reads like a Stephen King horror story.

     In May, 2022, Lindsay had given birth to her third child and was on maternity leave from her position as a labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Her husband’s leave ended before hers and she then became anxious because she too would soon have to return to work. She went to a psychiatrist for help.

     He prescribed her Zoloft. Her mental health began deteriorating immediately. Over the next four months three different psychiatrists, two nurse practitioners, and one doctor prescribed more medications for her or changed her medications or her dosages. In that short time period she was prescribed a total of eleven different psychiatric medications, including five antidepressants, three benzodiazepines, and one sleep medication.

     In his article David Carmichael carefully chronicles the week by week progression of Lindsay over those four months as more and more medications are prescribed and Lindsay’s mental health deteriorates to a state of delusional ideation. Finally, one evening she ends up killing her three children while home alone with them. Afterward she tries to commit suicide by swallowing a large amount of her medications, slitting her wrists and neck, and jumping out her second story window. She remains a paraplegic today.

     Her overmedication is a true horror story, but probably not unique.

     Her jury trial Monday will be a landmark test for placing responsibility for these three young deaths on the psychiatrists and health professionals who so recklessly buried this poor woman’s sanity under psychotropic medication.

     Carmichael ends his article by writing that acquittal of Lindsay Clancy “would be the just verdict in this tragic case.”

     He should know. In 2004 he was charged with murder for taking the life of his eleven year old son three weeks after he had started taking the antidepressant Paxil that he had been prescribed.