Thirteen. That is the number Kevin Reddington gave the jury in his opening statement at Lindsay Clancy's murder trial: thirteen different medications prescribed across four months, which, he said, "caused homicidal ideation, suicidal ideation."1 Thirteen sounds like poisoning. It conjures a woman marinating in chemicals, her mind dissolved in a pharmacy. It invites the defense’s desired conclusion, which is that the murders and attempted suicide of January 24, 2023 were done by the drugs and not by the person. In the last essay I wrote that this claim deserved a pharmacological answer rather than a rhetorical one. This is that answer. It begins not with what was prescribed but what was actually taken.
The Boston Globe, reconstructing the record, counted thirteen psychiatric medications across more than thirty prescriptions between September 2022 and January 2023, but noted that it is "unclear how many medications Clancy took at any one time, as her clinicians continually adjusted her dosages, stopped some medications and started others."2 A prosecutor confronted the jury with nine prescription bottles still holding their pills, observed that there were "a lot of pills prescribed, but not a lot of pills taken," and asserted that Clancy was on no more than three medications at any given time, and usually two.3
The particulars are worse for the defense’s theory. Of thirty lorazepam tablets prescribed in October, she took only six.4 The course of sertraline lasted only a week, and only at the lowest starting dose before it was stopped because of reported intolerance.5 She discontinued the clonazepam herself after two days.6 The mirtazapine she quit after four doses, telling her prescriber, "I really don't like the way I feel on the Remeron and I know that I can't stick with taking it."7 The buspirone she feared and avoided.8 She insisted on tapering off of the Seroquel despite her prescriber's caution that stopping it carried significant risk of worsening mood and sleep.9 The amitriptyline was increased at her final appointment, but she declined to take it.10 When a forensic toxicologist finally examined what was actually in her system after the killings, he found four agents, all at or below therapeutic concentrations, levels he testified were "not consistent with" someone who had swallowed handfuls of pills, though he allowed on cross-examination that numbers alone do not tell the whole tale.11 Thirteen, in other words, is the census of attempts, most of them abandoned. It describes the prescription pad, not the bloodstream.
The second question is sequence. The defense's theory requires the medications to be the origin of her derangement, but she sought a psychiatrist precisely because she was already unwell. At her first psychiatric visit in September 2022, before a single prescription had been written, she reported anxiety, insomnia, and feeling overwhelmed.12 Her own diary reflects this: "I want help. I want to be well."13 The churn of prescriptions that followed was not an experiment conducted on a healthy subject. It was the ordinary, miserable grind of outpatient psychiatry, chasing a worsening illness through a patient who tolerated almost nothing. A drug was started, a side effect reported, the drug stopped, another tried. Her husband testified that on the medications she "didn't get better. She got worse."14 I do not doubt it, but worsening despite treatment is the natural history of a deepening depression, much more often than it is an effect of the treatment. The whole weight of the defense's story rests on post hoc ergo propter hoc.
The third question is what the thirteen drugs actually were, and their names are less sensational than the count.15 Two SSRIs tried in sequence, never together: sertraline, then fluoxetine, standard first moves for postpartum anxiety and depression. A rotation of sleep agents as each failed or frightened her: trazodone, mirtazapine, zolpidem, an antihistamine, and amitriptyline at ten and twenty milligrams, which is an insomnia dose, not a depression dose. Three benzodiazepines, never simultaneously, dispensed in small counts for panic and for sleep. Buspirone, among the gentlest anxiolytics in the formulary, which she was afraid to take at all. When her clinicians began to worry about something worse than depression, the guideline moves appeared on cue: quetiapine, an antipsychotic that doubles as a sleep aid at low doses, and lamotrigine, a mood stabilizer, started exactly when bipolar disorder entered their differential.
There is no exotic agent on that list, no uncommon combination, and no aggressive dosing. This was a regimen of short trials, cautious doses, and quick retreats at every reported side effect, which is what prescribing looks like when the patient tolerates little and the prescriber is listening. The truest criticism is that she never completed an adequate trial of anything. Antidepressants need weeks at a therapeutic dose to work, and no drug on the list ever got them, and the two agents most likely to have mattered if the defense's diagnosis is correct, the antipsychotic and the mood stabilizer, are the two she pushed to stop.
I am not unsympathetic to the arguments made by critics. These are not inert substances. Their labels say so. Antidepressants can tip a person with a undiagnosed bipolar disposition into mania; the most comprehensive meta-analysis puts treatment-emergent mood elevation near 6 percent in unipolar depression against roughly 1 percent untreated, and mania can carry psychosis with it.16 This is the one pharmacologically respectable route from her prescription list to the defense's theory; an expert has said as much in the Globe's coverage of this case.17 The civil complaint against her providers presses the same story, calling her insomnia after starting antidepressants a missed red flag for bipolar disorder.18
The remaining medications on her list are unlikely culprits. Zolpidem carries a boxed warning, added in 2019, for complex sleep behaviors; people have walked, driven, and in rare cases died in states of incomplete arousal, sometimes after a single dose.19 Benzodiazepines can paradoxically disinhibit rather than calm, a reaction documented in well under 1 percent of patients and concentrated at the extremes of age and in people with brain injury or lifelong impulse pathology.20 These reactions are on the labels because they really do happen,21 but none of these are a good fit for this case. Zolpidem's automatisms are minutes of amnestic sleepwalking, not a sequenced hour of purposeful action. The paradoxical benzodiazepine reaction profiles a child, an elderly patient, or a brain-injured parolee far better than a 32-year-old nurse with no history of aggression. The manic switch after SSRI, the strongest card in this deck, is the one her clinicians were playing against in real time. Her nurse practitioner raised bipolar disorder in early December after she went two days without sleep on sertraline, and her psychiatrist weighed the diagnosis that same month and concluded she did not meet criteria.2223 No clinician who examined her, across two practices, a perinatal program, and a five-day admission to McLean Hospital, ever observed mania or psychosis, and McLean discharged her nineteen days before the killings with a diagnosis of major depressive disorder, severe, without psychotic features.24 The toxicology on the day found a total of four agents aboard, all at or below therapeutic levels, including the two, quetiapine and lamotrigine, whose entire purpose was to guard against the SSRI-induced mania and psychosis the defense alleges.25 Five clinicians and an inpatient unit watched for it and never once saw it. The mechanism is real but it is simply not hers.
Another drug on the list deserves its own examination, because the internet has singled it out. Quetiapine, which the public knows as Seroquel, is an antipsychotic, and its presence in her chart supplies the critics' favorite two-step: her doctors put her on an antipsychotic merely for sleep, and the antipsychotic can itself cause psychosis. The first claim describes a national bad habit accurately. Because low-dose quetiapine works mostly as a powerful antihistamine, American prescribers reach for it so freely that it ranks among the most prescribed insomnia drugs in the country, and reviewers have criticized the practice for years.26 But Clancy’s appears to be the rare chart where the habit was not lazy; in her case the drug was pulling double duty as both a sedative and treatment for possible underlying bipolar disorder. Blocking dopamine is how psychosis is treated, not how it is produced, and the route from quetiapine to psychotic symptoms is from stopping the drug rather than taking it. The label warns of withdrawal symptoms after abrupt cessation. There is literature on rapid-onset psychosis after antipsychotic discontinuation, assembled most prominently by Joanna Moncrieff, a leader of the critical psychiatry movement itself; its clearest cases are patients with established psychotic illness who abruptly stop years of treatment, above all clozapine, a drug mostly reserved for the sickest of the sick.2728
Nothing in that literature resembles a woman on a brief course of Seroquel winding down by supervised taper, with the drug still in her blood at therapeutic levels on the day of the murders.29 If the danger lay in the stopping, then the error was the taper, and the taper was the one drug decision in this record taken at the patient's insistence over her prescriber's explicit caution.30 With hindsight I will grant that honoring her request to stop Seroquel may have been a true mistake, but I will add that no one could have known it then, when yielding to a patient's insistence on reducing a sedating drug she blamed for feeling worse was normal and defensible. The critics cannot follow me even this far, because they are arguing two opposite things at once. The same voices that accuse her clinicians of missing an emerging bipolar or psychotic illness, for which an antipsychotic is the indicated treatment, also accuse the antipsychotic of causing her psychosis, which tacitly concedes there was nothing yet to miss. Hold both claims together and the prescriber's options disappear: medicate the feared illness and you have poisoned her; withhold the drug and you have missed it; agree to the taper and you have failed her. An accusation that condemns every branch of the decision tree is not an analysis of medical error but a Catch-22.
Now suppose the defense is right and this was postpartum psychosis, a psychiatric emergency whose standard of care is hospitalization and aggressive management including lithium, antipsychotics, and electroconvulsive therapy where needed.31 On the defense's own theory, then, the sin of Clancy's clinicians was not that they medicated her too much but that they medicated her too little, too gently, and too deferentially to her refusals. The overmedication claim is an undertreatment claim wearing a costume, and only one of those claims can be argued to a jury with a straight face while the word thirteen is still on the easel.
Moreover, we now have something close to a natural experiment on the defense's theory, and it was entered into the record by the Commonwealth's own examiner. Since her commitment to Tewksbury State Hospital, Lindsay Clancy has been maintained on olanzapine, an antipsychotic, for suspected bipolar disorder, together with trazodone, bupropion, clonidine, and propranolol, all, in the examining psychiatrist's words, at doses considered low.3233 Consider what that regimen is: an antipsychotic cousin of the quetiapine she once tapered, two antidepressant-class agents including a serotonin modulator, and two blood-pressure drugs repurposed for anxiety. Five psychiatric medications, drawn from the same shelves as the thirteen, representing more simultaneous medication than she was ever on previously. On them, by the account of the psychiatrist who examined her over two days this April, she is rational, cooperative, and organized, with nothing abnormal on her mental status examination beyond grief, distress, and, at times, suicidal thinking about her circumstances.34 No one describes psychosis. No one describes command auditory hallucination. She is intact enough that both sides have spent a summer trying her, which is itself a finding of competence that nobody in the courtroom disputes.
If medications of these classes install homicidal voices in Lindsay Clancy's head, someone should alert Tewksbury, because Tewksbury administers them to her every day and reports a stable patient. The classes that allegedly deranged her in December are the classes maintaining her lucidity now. It will be answered that this proves the defense's point, that she needed an antipsychotics and mood stabilizers all along and was given SSRIs instead. But her own clinicians reached for exactly these classes of medications in December, quetiapine and lamotrigine, the same classes Tewksbury relies on now, and Clancy pushed to taper off of them. The regimen that stabilizes her today is the regimen she was offered then, minus her refusals. The difference between then and now is not the pharmacology but the adherence, and the adherence is supplied by an involuntary hospitalization, for which she was not previously a candidate. Notice, finally, what nobody proposes: taking her off the drugs. The hospital that knows her best plainly believes she requires ongoing antipsychotic treatment, and her defense does not argue otherwise. That is the quiet concession beneath the whole trial. Medicated, she is this. The medications were never the villain, and their absence would not have been the cure.
As for the contention that psychiatric medication can produce violent behavior, the literature is mixed, but there is real signal and I do not hide from that. The FDA's class labeling for antidepressants lists agitation, irritability, hostility, impulsivity, akathisia, and mania among reported events, while stating that a causal link to worsening behavior "has not been established."35 The black-box warning concerns suicidal thinking, and it applies to patients up to age 24, a fact Dr. Tufts stated accurately from the witness stand.36 A case-report literature linking akathisia to violence exists, and its best-known authors have argued the connection forcefully.37 The strongest data we have are Swedish registry studies that compare individuals to themselves on and off medication. The first, covering more than 850,000 people on SSRIs, found an association with violent crime only among 15-to-24-year-olds, a hazard ratio of 1.43, and none in any older group; its authors warned the finding "cannot be interpreted causally."38 A successor study with longer follow-up found a modest elevation during treatment and for about twelve weeks after stopping, statistically significant only in patients up to their mid-30s, and the accompanying commentary noted that the elevation concentrated in people with prior criminal offending, that confounding by indication is extremely likely, and that 97 percent of patients prescribed SSRIs commit no violent crime at all.39 I will not pretend these studies say nothing; Clancy, at 32, sits outside the first study's window and inside the edge of the second's, and a fraction of a signal is not zero. But she had no history of violence, the effect sizes at issue are fractions above a person's own baseline, and depression itself, untreated, carries an association with violent crime three times the general population's, on data from the same registries: 47,158 depressed Swedes against nearly 900,000 controls, with the authors emphasizing that absolute rates remain low and that the overwhelming majority of depressed people never harm anyone.40
That is the pharmacology, rendered as fairly as I know how to render it. I have spent a career watching chemicals change minds, and I have no difficulty believing that psychoactive drugs can alter thinking, mood, and impulse. I will go further. If the associations in those registries are real, then simple arithmetic guarantees that marginal cases exist: there must be people, somewhere, who were carried across the line into violence by a medication and who would not have crossed it unmedicated. I accept that such people are out there. Here is what no one can do: find them.
There is no blood test for psychosis, and there is no assay for causation either, no scan that distinguishes a thought a drug installed from a thought a drug failed to remove. In any particular case the claim is unprovable, and it is equally undisprovable, which means it is not a finding but a story, available to anyone with a prescription history. Nearly every violent defendant has one, because psychiatric medication is ubiquitous in this country and it is most concentrated precisely in the disordered, addicted, and unstable population that commits the great majority of violent crime. A Finnish study that pulled the pre-crime prescription records of 959 homicide offenders found them so saturated with drugs of every kind that even anti-inflammatory painkillers showed an association with killing, which tells you less about ibuprofen than about who ends up committing homicide.41 If courts honored this pharmacological alibi, nearly every violent criminal in America could tell it, and behind every crime would stand a prescriber to blame. A few of the tellers would probably even be telling the truth. But an excuse that can be claimed by everyone and verified for no one is not an excuse a court can reasonably accept. It is a solvent poured over criminal responsibility itself, dissolving the guilty ninety-nine along with the unidentifiable marginal one.
The law reached the same conclusion long ago. Intoxication chosen is no excuse; a defendant who drinks the whiskey owns what he does on it. What the law does recognize is involuntary intoxication, the true pharmacological blindside: a drug administered surreptitiously to an unwilling or unknowing recipient, or an unforeseeable reaction to a medication taken as prescribed. These are judged by the same standards as insanity. The doctrine exists, but it almost never succeeds, because its elements are demanding. A survey of every American appellate case on the defense through 2012, ninety-eight in all, found that defendants seldom carry the burden, with exactly two reversals among the eighteen cases involving antidepressants.42 Notice the predicate doing the work: taken as prescribed. A record of skipped doses, self-directed discontinuations, a demanded taper, and levels at or below therapeutic is not a record that can occupy this doctrine.
The history of the courtroom version of the claim should also be told straight, because it embarrasses both sides. The "Prozac defense" was born with Joseph Wesbecker, who shot twenty people at a Louisville printing plant in 1989 a month after starting fluoxetine; the jury verdict exonerating the manufacturer turned out to have been purchased by a secret mid-trial settlement, and the Supreme Court of Kentucky, allowing the trial judge to investigate, wrote that "there was a serious lack of candor with the trial court and there may have been deception, bad faith conduct, abuse of the judicial process or perhaps even fraud."43 So I will not cite that verdict as vindication, and no one else should either. The other direction has its entries too: in 2001 a Wyoming civil jury assigned the maker of paroxetine 80 percent of the fault for Donald Schell's murder of his wife, daughter, and granddaughter, an $8 million judgment that remains the high-water mark of the genre.44 In Canada, David Carmichael was found not criminally responsible for killing his son after restarting paroxetine at a higher dose on his own initiative, though the court grounded its verdict in his psychotic depression, not in the drug.45 To my knowledge, that is the entirety of the legal precedent, thin in both directions.
The popular version of that rule is now a fixture of American life: the belief that psychiatric medication is what walks into the school with the rifle. The federal government is presently studying the question, announced amid exactly this conviction.46 The counting has already been done. The Violence Project's database of mass shooters found that roughly 11 percent of those with known medication status were taking SSRIs, against about 13 percent of American adults taking antidepressants; shooters are, if anything, undermedicated relative to the country they terrorize.47 The Columbia mass murder database puts documented antidepressant history among mass shooters at about 4 percent, and its lead researcher notes such perpetrators are less likely than average to have received treatment.48 Fact-checkers reviewing the claim against these datasets have found it unsupported in every systematic count.49 The drugged-shooter archetype is the memory of a few famous cases doing the work of a statistic. The likelier story is the one the counts above already imply. Mass shooters are not well adjusted people who stayed healthy until psychopharmacology made guinea pigs of them; far more often they are people whose mental illness went untreated or undertreated, which is exactly why they turn up less medicated than the country around them. As in the Clancy case, where drugs do appear in these histories, they were prescribed to treat the instability that fed the violence, not given for no reason to a sound mind. Medication that follows the madness cannot be recast as its source, at least not without extremely compelling evidence.
The scale of American psychopharmacology also warrants consideration. In the most recent federal survey, 24.9 percent of American women took prescription medication for their mental health within the past year, nearly twice the rate of men, and adults aged 30 to 44, the prime parenting years, are the most medicated age band in the country.50 Among adults of childbearing age the share of women receiving some form of mental health treatment climbed from 23.8 to 28.6 percent in just three years.51 In one large survey of American mothers, 46 percent reported seeking mental health services within the past year.52
It simply cannot be that a quarter of American women, and nearly half of mothers in a given year, are so diseased as to require professional intervention. If that were literally true, the problem would not be medical at all; it would be civilizational, an indictment of how we have arranged modern life, and no formulary would touch it. The critics of my profession look at these numbers and call them overdiagnosis, the pathologizing of ordinary sorrow, worry, and exhaustion into billable conditions, and they are mostly right. But there is a nuance the critics miss. I contend that America's problem is not entirely overtreatment but also extreme misallocation of the treatment.
The treated population and the sick population are not the same population. Treatment skews toward the functional: people with organized lives, money, insurance, and the executive capacity to make appointments, fill prescriptions, and follow through, people who do have real suffering, as we all do, but whose disease is often mild, or arguable, or absent. The gravest illness lives at the other end of the social ladder, among the psychotic, the disorganized, the addicted, and the homeless, who cannot or will not seek care, cannot sustain it when it finds them, and, since the asylums closed, cannot be compelled into it. The literature on this point is difficult to explain for those who take a black and white view opposing all psychiatric medication: antipsychotics cut violent crime nearly in half in the severely ill, and homicide in psychotic illness concentrates overwhelmingly before the first treatment ever begins.5354 The drugs work best exactly where they tend never to arrive. We have contrived to be overmedicated and undertreated at the same time, pills pooling where the disease is shallowest, disease pooling where the pills never reach.
Lindsay Clancy sits at the shallow end of that pool. She was not the untreated raving madwoman whom our system cannot help. On the contrary Clancy was the best-served kind of patient American psychiatry produces: organized, insured, employed at one of the great hospitals of the world, and surrounded by family who mobilized on her behalf. The roster of prescribers her defense now brandishes as evidence of medical chaos is also a ledger of her own capacity. She made appointments, pursued referrals, chose a hospital, entered a specialized program, and composed portal messages with a precision her psychiatrist testified she relied upon.55 Nobody dragged her into the pharmacy or held her down and injected her. She and her family assembled that care, as the resourced and functional do, and what resulted were the ordinary first-line prescriptions that a quarter of the women in this country receive. If those prescriptions are an alibi for her, they are an alibi for tens of millions, which returns us to where this essay began. The number thirteen was never evidence of what was done to her. It was just evidence of what she was able to get. It actually strongly argues that she was not, as the defense would have us believe, psychotic; the actively psychotic cannot and do not seek regular outpatient treatment from half a dozen clinicians, pick up meds from pharmacies reliably, and compose eloquent MyChart messages to them detailing their intolerances to those meds.
We do not even need the literature to know how to think about this, because society already thinks about it clearly when the chemical is familiar. Roughly 35 to 40 percent of violent offenders in federal statistics were drinking at the time of the offense.56 Methamphetamine at heavy use multiplies the odds of violence roughly ninefold, an effect an order of magnitude beyond anything in the SSRI literature.57 We convict those defendants every day, and rightly, because the intoxication was chosen, and responsibility follows the choice. It would be a strange morality that held the man who chose whiskey fully answerable for what he did on it while excusing entirely what a woman did on medications she was free to refuse, and, by the evidence at her own trial, mostly did refuse. No one held a gun to her head and made her take them. The record is that mostly she did not, and what remains when the pharmacology is stripped away is what was there before the first prescription: a woman who retained, at every appointment and every dose, the same agency the rest of us carry into every bar.
Beneath the specific accusations, I suspect, runs a conviction that fewer critics state aloud, though some do: that psychiatric medication is illegitimate root and branch, that the discipline is not medicine at all, and that what happened to Lindsay Clancy is simply what psychiatry does to people. I am less hostile to that position than my colleagues would prefer. I have conceded in this essay that the profession overdiagnoses the functional, and I have argued elsewhere that it abandons the sick. But whoever holds the position must follow it where it leads, and it does not lead where the critics want to go. The prescription is psychiatry's distinctive offering; it is what separates the psychiatrist from the psychologist, the counselor, and the priest, all of whom can offer words and lend an ear, and all of whom were available to her. To seek out psychiatric prescribers is to seek the pills, and she sought them, plural, over four months, remaining free the entire time to walk out of every office and never return. If the field is bunk, the coherent response is to stay away from its practitioners, not to consult them and then indict them for practicing their discipline. The indictment also mistakes the nature of the transaction. A prescription is a recommendation, not a mandate. The prescriber commands no dose, enforces no taper, and holds no writ over what the patient does after she drives home; no clinician and no court ever found Lindsay Clancy incapable of directing her own care. We built the arrangement that way deliberately, and rightly, because patients own their bodies and therefore their treatment. But that liberty carries its price. A system in which the patient may choose the doctor, accept the drug, refuse the drug, and force the taper cannot be recast, at the moment of catastrophe, as a system in which the doctor was secretly in command. The authority stayed in her hands through all of it.
Here, finally, is the crux. A pill cannot teach right from wrong. Neither can a pill unteach it. Psychoactive drugs are psychoactive; they can dull, agitate, disinhibit, and at their worst derange. What they cannot do is transfer the ownership of an act from the person who performed it to the person who prescribed for her.
An alibi, in the old sense, is a claim to have been somewhere else. The pharmacological alibi claims she was absent from herself, carried off by chemicals she in fact declined more often than she swallowed. The medications Lindsay Clancy was offered were an attempt at rescue, extended to an illness that predated all of them, accepted and refused at her own discretion for four months. Whether they helped her, failed her, or harmed her, they were answers to her condition, not authors of her conduct.
This essay is part of a series on the trial of Lindsay Clancy. Read the other parts below:
Part 1 - This Is a Murder Trial, Doctor
The Boston Globe. Watch: opening statements in Lindsay Clancy murder trial. July 27, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/27/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-opening-statements-kevin-reddington/
The Boston Globe. Timeline: Lindsay Clancy was prescribed 13 different medications before killing her children. July 27, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/27/metro/lindsay-clancy-timeline-medications-13/
Fox News. Lindsay Clancy's ex-husband details pill use as expert says evidence could shape murder trial. August 2026. https://www.foxnews.com/us/lindsay-clancy-ex-husband-details-pill-use-expert-says-evidence-could-shape-murder-trial
The Boston Globe. Lindsay Clancy trial live updates, Day 1. July 27, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/27/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-live-updates/
The Boston Globe. Lindsay Clancy trial live updates, Day 10. August 10, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/10/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-live-updates/
The Boston Globe. Lindsay Clancy trial live updates, Day 11. August 11, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/11/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-live-updates/
NBC10 Boston. Lindsay Clancy trial focuses on medications she was prescribed. August 11, 2026. https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/lindsay-clancy-trial-psychiatrist-testimony-medications/3996071/
The Boston Globe. Lindsay Clancy trial live updates, Day 10. August 10, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/10/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-live-updates/
The Boston Globe. Lindsay Clancy trial live updates, Day 11. August 11, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/11/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-live-updates/
The Boston Globe. Lindsay Clancy trial live updates, Day 10. August 10, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/10/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-live-updates/
Charalambous P, et al. Lindsay Clancy trial: toxicology expert testifies that drug levels were low. ABC News. August 2026. https://abcnews.com/GMA/News/lindsay-clancy-trial-toxicology-expert-testifies-drug-levels/story?id=135394092
Becker D. Lindsay Clancy trial spotlights her psychiatric care before she killed her 3 children. WBUR. August 8, 2026. https://www.wbur.org/news/2026/08/08/clancy-psychiatric-care-testimony-clinicians
Peltz J (Associated Press). Lindsay Clancy chronicled her desperation and "brain fog" in her diary before the killings. PBS NewsHour. August 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/lindsay-clancy-chronicled-her-desperation-and-brain-fog-in-her-diary-before-the-killings
The Boston Globe. Lindsay Clancy trial live updates, Day 1. July 27, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/27/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-live-updates/
The Boston Globe. Timeline: Lindsay Clancy was prescribed 13 different medications before killing her children. July 27, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/27/metro/lindsay-clancy-timeline-medications-13/
Tondo L, Vazquez G, Baldessarini RJ. Mania associated with antidepressant treatment: comprehensive meta-analytic review. Acta Psychiatr Scand. 2010;121(6):404-414. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK80224/
The Boston Globe. Timeline: Lindsay Clancy was prescribed 13 different medications before killing her children. July 27, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/27/metro/lindsay-clancy-timeline-medications-13/
Spatz E. Here's what to know about Lindsay and Patrick Clancy's civil suits against her providers. The Boston Globe. August 4, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/04/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-patrick-civil-suits/
US Food and Drug Administration. FDA adds boxed warning for risk of serious injuries caused by sleepwalking with certain prescription insomnia medicines. April 30, 2019. https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/fda-adds-boxed-warning-risk-serious-injuries-caused-sleepwalking-certain-prescription-insomnia
Paton C. Benzodiazepines and disinhibition: a review. Psychiatric Bulletin. 2002;26(12):460-462. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychiatric-bulletin/article/benzodiazepines-and-disinhibition-a-review/421AF197362B55EDF004700452BF3BC6
US Food and Drug Administration. Class labeling for antidepressant medications (revised suicidality warning language). 2005. https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2005/18207s030lbl.pdf
The Boston Globe. Lindsay Clancy trial live updates, Day 11. August 11, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/11/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-live-updates/
The Boston Globe. Lindsay Clancy trial live updates, Day 10. August 10, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/10/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-live-updates/
Peltz J (Associated Press). Lindsay Clancy trial spotlights psychiatric hospital stay before she killed her 3 children. PBS NewsHour. August 7, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/lindsay-clancy-trial-spotlights-psychiatric-hospital-stay-before-she-killed-her-3-children
Charalambous P, et al. Lindsay Clancy trial: toxicology expert testifies that drug levels were low. ABC News. August 2026. https://abcnews.com/GMA/News/lindsay-clancy-trial-toxicology-expert-testifies-drug-levels/story?id=135394092
Modesto-Lowe V, Harabasz AK, Walker SA. Quetiapine for primary insomnia: consider the risks. Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine. 2021;88(5):286-294. https://www.ccjm.org/content/88/5/286
US Food and Drug Administration. Seroquel (quetiapine fumarate) prescribing information, section 5.19, discontinuation syndrome. Revised January 2025. https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2025/020639s074lbl.pdf
Moncrieff J. Does antipsychotic withdrawal provoke psychosis? Review of the literature on rapid onset psychosis (supersensitivity psychosis) and withdrawal-related relapse. Acta Psychiatr Scand. 2006;114(1):3-13. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16774655/
Charalambous P, et al. Lindsay Clancy trial: toxicology expert testifies that drug levels were low. ABC News. August 2026. https://abcnews.com/GMA/News/lindsay-clancy-trial-toxicology-expert-testifies-drug-levels/story?id=135394092
The Boston Globe. Lindsay Clancy trial live updates, Day 11. August 11, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/11/metro/lindsay-clancy-trial-live-updates/
Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Women's Mental Health. Postpartum psychiatric disorders. https://womensmentalhealth.org/specialty-clinics/postpartum-psychiatric-disorders-2/
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I have three children, all home births, and I never suffered any kind of depression. The body gives a laboring woman a huge dose of endorphins after a baby is born and I felt great.
The women I know who had hospital births were put on drugs, epidurals, labor-inducers, etc. Those women didn’t get their post-birth endorphin bump. One friend described it as ‘trying to connect with this baby while climbing out of a k-hole (ketamine).’
Is there any research on whether medicated births are more likely to produce depression over natural birthing?