478. The Drugs That Lindsay Clancy Was Given Predictably Cause Psychosis, Suicide, and Homicide. Since Her Doctors Knew This, They Were Responsible for the Deaths.
13 medications in 4 months, and 5 providers who never spoke to each other. The evidence proves that she was innocent and that her children’s slaughter was due to her physicians.
Robert Yoho, MD
Summary
● On January 24, 2023, Lindsay Clancy, a labor and delivery nurse from Duxbury, Massachusetts, strangled her 3 children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months old, then attempted suicide by jumping from a second-story window.
● In the 4 months before the killings, 5 separate providers wrote her more than 30 prescriptions for 13 different psychiatric medications, adjusting doses and adding new medications every few days.
● 6 of those 13 drugs, Zoloft, Prozac, Desyrel, Remeron, Elavil, and Seroquel, bear an FDA black box warning for suicidal thoughts and behavior. A 7th, Lamictal, bears a related FDA warning added in 2008. This is not a new or contested finding. It dates back to the drugs’ original trials in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
● Her trial ended in a mistrial on September 4, 2026. The jury deadlocked 11 to 1, with 11 jurors favoring a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity verdict.
● Plymouth County prosecutors have not yet decided whether to retry her. A status hearing is scheduled for September 29, 2026.
● Clancy stays hospitalized at Tewksbury State Hospital, paralyzed from her suicide attempt, more than 3 years after the killings.
● The culpability for the murders lies entirely with the doctors who prescribed the psychiatric medications, which are well known to cause violence and suicide.
What happened in Duxbury
Lindsay Clancy spent the morning of January 24, 2023, as she did most mornings that winter. She took her children to a pediatrician’s appointment, then built a snowman with them in the yard of her Duxbury home. Around 4 p.m., she sent her husband, Patrick, on an errand. While he was gone, she strangled Cora, Dawson, and Callan with resistance exercise bands in the basement. She then cut her wrists and throat and jumped from a second-story window. Patrick returned home around 6:09 p.m., found the scene, and called 911 2 minutes later. Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead at the hospital that night. Callan died 3 days later from asphyxiation-related complications. Lindsay Clancy survived, permanently paralyzed from the fall.
Prosecutors charged her with 3 counts of first-degree murder.
13 drugs in 4 months
The most important evidence in this case never came from a crime scene. It came from pharmacy and medical records.
Between September 2022 and January 2023, Clancy received psychiatric care for postpartum depression and anxiety from a rotating cast of providers, none of whom appear to have coordinated with one another. Court testimony, including testimony from psychiatric nurse practitioner Rebecca Jollotta of South Shore Health’s Perinatal Behavioral Health Program, and a medication timeline compiled by the Boston Globe from trial evidence documented the following prescribing history:
● Zoloft (sertraline), started in September 2022, discontinued for insomnia. FDA black box warning: suicidal thoughts and behavior.
● Ativan (lorazepam), prescribed October 21, dose reduced November 2. A benzodiazepine, the drug class tied in published case literature to disinhibition and aggressive dyscontrol in a subset of patients.
● Benadryl (diphenhydramine), added as a sleep aid.
● Buspar (buspirone), prescribed twice within two weeks by the same provider, largely not taken.
● Desyrel (trazodone), prescribed November 15. FDA black box warning: suicidal thoughts and behavior.
● Prozac (fluoxetine), prescribed November 21. FDA black box warning: suicidal thoughts and behavior, the same signal first documented in fluoxetine’s own clinical literature in 1990.
● Ambien (zolpidem), added November 25.
● Remeron (mirtazapine), added November 25. FDA black box warning: suicidal thoughts and behavior. Clancy later described this drug as causing “very intrusive thoughts that I never had before” and asked to be taken off it.
● Klonopin (clonazepam), added November 25. A benzodiazepine, in the same disinhibition-and-aggression literature as Ativan and Valium.
● Valium (diazepam), prescribed multiple times, days apart, by different providers. The benzodiazepine most directly implicated in published reports of drug-induced rage and dyscontrol.
● Seroquel (quetiapine), an antipsychotic, prescribed November 29. Bears 2 FDA black box warnings: suicidal thoughts and behavior, and increased mortality in elderly patients with dementia-related psychosis. Hospital staff advised discontinuing it on December 20, over the treating nurse practitioner’s objection that stopping it risked “worsening of mood, worsening of sleep.”
● Lamictal (lamotrigine), a mood stabilizer, prescribed December 16. Bears an FDA warning for suicidal thoughts and behavior, added in 2008 after a pooled analysis of 199 trials of 11 anticonvulsants found the risk elevated across the drug class.
● Elavil (amitriptyline), prescribed January 16, 8 days before the killings. FDA black box warning: suicidal thoughts and behavior, the same warning every antidepressant on this list bears.
13 drugs. 5 classes: an SSRI, an antipsychotic, 3 benzodiazepines, a mood stabilizer, and multiple sedative-hypnotics, layered on top of each other and swapped out in a matter of days by clinicians who were not communicating. This is not treatment. It is an uncontrolled experiment on a postpartum woman’s brain chemistry, run by a fragmented health system that bills each visit and moves on.
Prosecutors argued at trial that Clancy took only a fraction of the prescribed dose and that toxicology results were inconsistent with the defense’s “overmedicated” narrative. That dispute was never resolved. The jury deadlocked before deciding who was right.
A jury divided
Clancy’s trial opened in late July 2026 in the Plymouth County Superior Court before Judge William Sullivan. The defense argued that she was not criminally responsible under Massachusetts law because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, an underlying bipolar disorder, or both during the killings.
Yoho comment: Postpartum depression or even psychosis often responds to a progesterone injection, though any patient in a psychotic crisis needs immediate supervision, regardless of the cause. Hormone therapy is neither fashionable nor considered reasonable by conventional medicine, so this is not common knowledge. The same barriers apply to prescribing testosterone and other hormones, as I described in Hormone Secrets.
Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Phillip Resnick testified that she was “clearly psychotic” that day and described her behavior as “almost like a puppet,” as though “someone else was pulling the strings.” Psychologist Paul Zeizel testified that she “had no appreciation for the wrongfulness of her act.” Family members, including her nanny and her mother, sister, and mother-in-law, described a rapid, visible decline in her mental state in the weeks before the killings, along with repeated failed attempts to get her help.
Prosecutors countered that Clancy acted with planning and rational thought. She timed her husband’s absence, chose the basement, killed the child most likely to resist first, and, during a telehealth appointment the day before, denied any thoughts of harming her children. Their own psychiatric experts, Dr. Gregory Saathoff and Dr. Kirk Heilbrun, testified that a detail in her account, namely that she heard a commanding voice only once, was atypical of genuine psychosis. A third prosecution expert, Dr. Alia Goodheart of McLean Hospital, testified that Clancy showed depression and sleep problems but did not display psychosis.
Yoho comment: Planning like this is a documented pattern in SSRI-related violence, not evidence against it.
The jury deliberated for 6 days, roughly 36 hours, beginning on August 27. On September 4, 2026, they informed Judge Sullivan they were deadlocked and would not reach a unanimous verdict. He declared a mistrial. The jury, composed of 9 women and 3 men, had split 11 to 1, with 11 jurors favoring a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.
11 of 12 jurors, having sat through 6 weeks of testimony from psychiatrists, family members, and treating clinicians on both sides, concluded that Lindsay Clancy did not belong in prison. That fact alone deserves more weight than it has received in coverage of this case.
What is not confirmed
One juror, Paula Devlin, gave a televised interview after the mistrial, describing the lone holdout as a Black man on an otherwise white jury and saying he refused to explain his reasoning in light of the evidence. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington was blunt in his response, saying he hoped the juror “can sleep well at night.” The defense had separately argued in court filings that the holdout’s position reflected bias against people with severe mental illness.
Devlin’s account is the sole source for the standoff’s racial composition. No court record independently confirms it. Following her interview, someone identified a specific individual online as the holdout juror, and Massachusetts Superior Court records were subsequently sealed to protect juror privacy and safety. This paper will not repeat that identification or the unverified allegations associated with it. A hung jury does not deserve a doxxing campaign, regardless of the outcome anyone wanted.
What is fair to say is this: a jury that heard the full medical record split overwhelmingly in favor of finding Lindsay Clancy not criminally responsible, and one juror, for reasons that remain his own, prevented that verdict from becoming official.
The warning was there from the first studies
This is not a story about two unlucky families whose tragedies coincided with a prescription bottle. It is a story about a documented, published, and repeatedly replicated safety signal that the psychiatric profession has spent 35 years downplaying, while the industry that sells these drugs has worked to keep it that way.
Fluoxetine, sold as Prozac, was barely on the market before case reports began. In 1990, Harvard psychiatrists Martin Teicher, Carol Glod, and Jonathan Cole published “Emergence of Intense Suicidal Preoccupation During Fluoxetine Treatment” in the American Journal of Psychiatry, describing patients with no history of suicidal ideation who developed violent, intrusive suicidal preoccupation within weeks of starting the drug. Two years later, William Wirshing and colleagues, writing in the Archives of General Psychiatry, proposed the mechanism: fluoxetine-induced akathisia, a state of unbearable inner restlessness severe enough to drive a person toward violence against themselves or, in some documented cases, against others. Eli Lilly, the drug’s manufacturer, felt the alarm keenly enough to publish its own rebuttal meta-analysis in the BMJ the same year, an industry-funded paper that exists only because the company needed to answer questions its own trial data was never going to make disappear.
The benzodiazepines in Clancy’s regimen have a parallel, separately documented history. Published case series, including Gardner and Cowdry’s 1985 report in the American Journal of Psychiatry and Dietch and Jennings’s 1988 report in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, describe patients taking drugs in the same class as Ativan, Klonopin, and Valium developing sudden, uncharacteristic rage and aggressive dyscontrol. A 2002 review in Psychiatric Bulletin confirmed the pattern is real, while noting it concentrates in identifiable risk groups. The profession that prescribed Lindsay Clancy 3 benzodiazepines, on top of 2 antidepressants, on top of an antipsychotic, on top of a mood stabilizer, bears responsibility for thousands of incidents like this one. No one used the word akathisia at Clancy’s trial. That is not because the mechanism does not apply to a case built on rapid, high-dose, multi-drug psychiatric prescribing. It is because the prosecution had no reason to raise it, and the defense chose the simpler, conventional story to tell a jury in 6 weeks: postpartum psychosis.
The industry’s own record undercuts the studies it used to build its case. In 2008, Erick Turner and colleagues published “Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trials and Its Influence on Apparent Efficacy” in the New England Journal of Medicine, comparing what drug companies submitted to the FDA with what made it into the medical journals doctors read. Trials with favorable results were published almost without exception. Trials with negative or unimpressive results mostly vanished, or resurfaced dressed up as something more favorable than the data supported. Add to that the fact that these trials typically ran 6 to 8 weeks, and that a drug’s own side effects – dry mouth, sedation, restlessness – often tell a patient and a rater which pill they got, undermining the blind that the entire safety comparison depends on.
Grant those trials their cleanest possible reading anyway. It does not matter. No patient takes a psychiatric drug for 6 to 8 weeks and then stops. Zoloft, Ativan, Prozac, Klonopin, Seroquel, and the rest of Clancy’s list are prescribed for years, often for life, and the trials that supposedly justify keeping a patient on them that long constitute a different, far weaker body of evidence than the initial approval trials. Robert Whitaker, in Anatomy of an Epidemic, argues that these long-term studies deliberately compare a medicated patient with one abruptly withdrawn from the same drug, not with a drug-naive patient, so what is scored as “relapse” in the placebo arm is withdrawal.
A drug that cannot be stopped without provoking the symptoms it was prescribed to treat is not a treatment a patient chooses to continue. It is an addiction she cannot leave. Ativan, Klonopin, and Valium are federal Schedule IV controlled substances precisely because benzodiazepine dependence is real, legally recognized, and has been since the 1970s. SSRIs were marketed as free of that problem. A 2019 systematic review in Addictive Behaviors found that 56 percent of patients who try to stop an antidepressant experience withdrawal symptoms, and 46 percent of those report the withdrawal as severe. Other researchers have since disputed that finding on methodological grounds, though not the underlying clinical phenomenon.
A drug class this hard to stop, prescribed for conditions this common, is not an accident of chemistry. A 2002 BMJ paper by Ray Moynihan, Iona Heath, and David Henry, and a blunter 2018 Goldman Sachs research note that asks outright whether curing patients is a sustainable business model, both make the same point from opposite ends of the industry: a drug a patient takes once is worth far less to a manufacturer than a drug a patient cannot stop taking. Nothing about Lindsay Clancy’s 4 months on 13 drugs looks like a system optimized for her recovery. It looks like a system built to produce this outcome, whatever anyone in it intended.
What “standard of care” hides
None of the material in the section above is secret. The profession has published, replicated, and debated it for more than 3 decades in its own journals. A clinician who layers an antipsychotic on top of 3 benzodiazepines, 5 antidepressants, and a mood stabilizer within 4 months commits malpractice and bears responsibility for any violence that follows.
I call the incident a “clean kill by the woman’s doctors.” As ridiculous as it sounds, the standard of care will, in all likelihood, protect every prescriber named in this file from a licensing board, a malpractice jury, and a headline. The standard of care measures what an ordinarily careful colleague would have done under the same circumstances. It says nothing about whether an entire specialty, trained on a rigged evidence base by corrupt pharmaceutical companies and shielded from consequences by its own guidelines, has been getting this catastrophically wrong for 4 decades.
Yoho comment: Five providers spent 4 months chasing a diagnosis of postpartum depression, for which the hormonal treatment, a modest dose of progesterone given orally or by injection, is almost none of them will have considered. This is not standard practice, not because it fails to work, but because American medicine rarely uses hormones as medications. Testosterone, a fantastically useful substance for both men and women, was a Schedule III controlled substance until recently, regulated with more suspicion than antidepressants and antipsychotics that bear black box warnings for suicidal thinking. That imbalance is not an accident of pharmacology. It is a pattern of suppression. Hormone replacement, matched to a patient’s physiology, delivers tremendous medical benefit and belongs in the standard toolkit of every primary care physician, not the fringe.
I do not believe psychiatric drugs belong on a pharmacy formulary at all. They were approved based on 6-to-8-week trials that describe almost no one who takes them long term, funded and controlled by the companies selling them, with losing trials quietly filtered out of the medical literature doctors were trained on, a pattern the New England Journal of Medicine itself documented in 2008.¹ The same company that told the FDA one story about fluoxetine’s suicide risk told its own executives another, privately and in writing, and pleaded guilty in 2012 to federal charges for suppressing a failed pediatric Paxil trial behind a ghostwritten journal article. Call that process what it is: fraud dressed up as science. A drug with that history should bear the burden of proving itself safe in a real trial, not the burden on a family that has already buried 3 children.
¹ For more, see madinamerica.com and Robert Whitaker’s book, Anatomy of an Epidemic.
The precedent: David Carmichael and Paxil
This is not a new pattern. In July 2004, David Carmichael, a Toronto father with no history of violence or mental illness, was prescribed the SSRI Paxil (paroxetine) for work-related stress. Within 3 weeks of restarting and increasing his dose, he developed fixed delusions and a break from reality, then smothered his 11-year-old son, Ian, in a hotel room, believing, in his psychotic state, that he was sparing the boy from suffering. A London, Ontario, court found him not criminally responsible on account of a mental disorder. 2 independent forensic psychiatrists, one retained by the defense and the other by the Crown, agreed that he was psychotic when he killed his son.
Carmichael has spent the past 2 decades building a public case that Paxil caused his psychosis, citing the drug’s own product monograph, which listed delusions and psychosis as rare side effects as far back as 1996. He now leads Know Your Drugs, an advocacy organization pressing for mandatory toxicology testing of mass shooters, including psychiatric medications. Tennessee adopted that policy in 2026.
Massachusetts is not Ontario, and its insanity standard is not identical to Canada’s not-criminally-responsible defense. But the underlying medical mechanism is the same one that produced 11 jurors ready to acquit Lindsay Clancy: psychiatric prescribing can produce psychosis in people with no prior history of it.
Paxil’s paper trail: Healy, Dolin, and the documents the industry did not want found
Psychiatry has spent decades explaining away deaths and violence linked to these medications as a product of the underlying illness rather than the drug. Psychiatrist David Healy, who reviewed internal Eli Lilly documents from the Prozac litigation, found that company executives privately estimated the drug’s suicide risk at 5.6 times that of an older antidepressant, imipramine, while telling the public and regulators otherwise. Peter Gøtzsche later reanalyzed a 2006 FDA meta-analysis of 100,000 patients and concluded that the true suicide risk had been underreported by a factor of 15. GlaxoSmithKline’s own paper trail tells the same story: in 2012, the company pleaded guilty to federal charges and paid 3 billion dollars, the largest healthcare fraud settlement in U.S. history at the time, after prosecutors found it had promoted Paxil to treat depression in patients under 18 using a ghostwritten journal article that misreported a failed pediatric trial, while 2 other pediatric trials showing Paxil did not work were never disclosed.
Stewart Dolin, a Chicago attorney with no history of depression, took generic paroxetine for 8 days to treat work-related anxiety before walking in front of a train. His widow, Wendy Dolin, won a jury verdict against the drug’s manufacturers in 2017 after discovery revealed that the company had known for years about the drug’s link to akathisia, an intense, drug-induced agitation that Healy and psychiatrist Peter Breggin identify as the mechanism most associated with SSRI-triggered violence and suicide. An appeals court later overturned that verdict under a legal doctrine unrelated to the underlying medical evidence, but the trial record and the internal company documents it uncovered remain public.
The trial record in Clancy’s own case establishes, without dispute from either side, that 5 providers prescribed her 13 different psychiatric drugs over 4 months, repeatedly changing course, sometimes prescribing the same drug twice within two weeks, right up until 8 days before she killed her children.
Not guilty by reason of insanity
Massachusetts law asks whether, at the time of the act, a defendant lacked the substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform it to the law because of mental disease or defect. Two forensic experts testified that Clancy met that standard. Family members who watched her mental state deteriorate in real time and repeatedly tried to get her more help corroborated that testimony.
The prosecution’s strongest point was that she planned the timing and location of the killings. Planning and psychosis are not mutually exclusive. David Carmichael planned the circumstances of his son’s death with the same calm, organized purpose prosecutors describe in Clancy’s case, while acting on delusions a court later found rendered him not criminally responsible. Forensic psychiatry recognizes this pattern often enough to have a name for it: organized, purposeful behavior driven by psychotic content. A person executes a plan with total conviction even as the reasoning behind it is severed from reality.
11 jurors reached the same conclusion after weeks of testimony, which this post has only summarized. A prosecution built on toxicology inferences and a single atypical detail in Clancy’s account of hearing a voice failed to persuade them. It should not settle the matter for the rest of us either.
Lindsay Clancy has already spent more than 3 years hospitalized, paralyzed, and separated from what remains of her family. Prison adds nothing to that. A verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity, with continued commitment to a psychiatric facility, aligns with both the medical record and the moral reality of what 5 careless prescribers did to a new mother’s brain over 4 months.
Synthesis: the truth has been covered up.
In the 4 months before the killings, 5 providers gave Lindsay Clancy 13 psychiatric drugs in rotation, 6 of which carried an FDA black box warning for suicidal thoughts and behavior, changing her regimen every few days, right up to 8 days before the deaths. 11 of 12 jurors who heard the complete medical and psychiatric record voted not guilty by reason of insanity.
Her actions reflect purposeful behavior in service of delusional beliefs, a pattern documented in David Carmichael’s case and many others like it. No one at trial invoked the well-known mechanism—drug-induced akathisia. Yet the weight of the evidence, the precedent of similar cases, and 35 years of published, peer-reviewed literature on these drug classes all point to the same conclusion the first jury nearly reached: Lindsay Clancy was assaulted by her 5 providers. Their treatment followed a corrupt “standard of care” that protects doctors and corporate medicine, not patients.
Lindsay’s prosecutors’ grotesque pursuit of “justice” reveals an outrageous lack of insight into the situation. She is already in prison for life with her paralysis and guilt. The expensive, public, time-consuming trial served no purpose aside from confusing the public. Media coverage of the case steered the narrative into a thicket of deceit. Attempts to pin the controversy on political or racial differences reveal how deceptive they have become; their lies show the world what they are—mouthpieces for psychopaths.
The mendacity of Big Pharma and the canard that psychiatrists and their drugs are reliably therapeutic are obvious to sophisticated observers. They remain hidden only because those with the power to uncover it all will not.
The murderers in this case are not the people in the public’s crosshairs. This whole sad, nasty charade is a statement about the intellectual poverty of our legal profession, Big Pharma’s criminal control over American medicine, and the abject failure of our traitorous media.
My next post is titled “SSRI ‘Antidepressant’ Psychiatric Medications Cause Suicide and Homicide: A Complete History.” It will fill you in on details I didn’t have space to include here.
Selected references
NPR, “Lindsay Clancy Trial Ends in Mistrial,” September 4, 2026.
CBS News Boston, “Lindsay Clancy Murder Trial: Hung Jury, Mistrial,” live updates.
The Boston Globe, “Lindsay Clancy Timeline: 13 Medications,” July 27, 2026.
NBC Boston, “Lindsay Clancy Trial: Psychiatrist Testimony on Medications.”
NewsNation, “Lindsay Clancy Only Took Fraction of Her Prescribed Medications, Prosecutors Say.”
Wikipedia, “Killing of the Clancy Children.”
Fox News, “Lone Holdout Juror in Lindsay Clancy Trial Was Only Black Person on Panel, Juror Reveals.”
Turn to 10, “Judge Seals Lindsay Clancy Jurors’ Identities After Holdout Named Online,” September 14, 2026.
Teicher MH, Glod C, Cole JO, “Emergence of Intense Suicidal Preoccupation During Fluoxetine Treatment,”American Journal of Psychiatry, 1990.
Wirshing WC, Van Putten T, Rosenberg J, et al., “Fluoxetine, Akathisia, and Suicidality: Is There a Causal Connection?” Archives of General Psychiatry, 1992.
Beasley CM Jr, et al., “Fluoxetine and Suicide: A Meta-Analysis of Controlled Trials of Treatment for Depression,” BMJ, 1991.
Gardner DL, Cowdry RW, “Alprazolam-Induced Dyscontrol in Borderline Personality Disorder,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 1985.
Dietch JT, Jennings RK, “Aggressive Dyscontrol in Patients Treated with Benzodiazepines,” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 1988.
Paton C, “Benzodiazepines and Disinhibition: A Review,” Psychiatric Bulletin, 2002.
Turner EH, Matthews AM, Linardatos E, Rosenthal RS, Rosenthal R, “Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trials and Its Influence on Apparent Efficacy,” New England Journal of Medicine, 2008.
Robert Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. Crown, 2010.
Davies J, Read J, “A Systematic Review into the Incidence, Severity and Duration of Antidepressant Withdrawal Effects: Are Guidelines Evidence-Based?” Addictive Behaviors, 2019.
Moynihan R, Heath I, Henry D, “Selling Sickness: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Disease Mongering,” BMJ, 2002.
Goldman Sachs (analyst Salveen Richter), “The Genome Revolution,” reported as “Goldman Asks: Is Curing Patients a Sustainable Business Model?” CNBC, April 11, 2018.
U.S. Department of Justice, “GlaxoSmithKline to Plead Guilty and Pay $3 Billion to Resolve Fraud Allegations and Failure to Report Safety Data,” July 2, 2012.
David Carmichael, “Three Weeks to Prescripticide.” RxISK.
David Carmichael, “Calm, Organized, Homicidal Behaviour: My Connection to School Shooters.” Mad in America, March 27, 2018.
Wisner Baum, “Dolin v. GlaxoSmithKline: The Paxil Suicide Trial.”
Mad in America, “Paxil Suicide Verdict Overturned on Appeal,” 2018.
Robert Yoho, MD, “David Carmichael’s Tragedy Was the Worst I’ve Ever Heard.” Surviving Healthcare, September 24, 2025.