The Lindsay Clancy Case Is Not a Whodunit: It’s a Warning

In over twenty years as a criminal attorney, I have watched a lot of criminal cases become something other than criminal cases.

They become television shows. Morality plays. Political arguments. Internet investigations. A person gets charged with a crime and within approximately 72 hours, half the country has obtained an honorary degree in forensic pathology from TikTok University.

The Lindsay Clancy Case is No Exception

Clancy is currently on trial in Massachusetts for killing her three young children—Cora, Dawson and Callan—in January 2023. There is no real dispute at trial that Lindsay Clancy killed them. Her lawyers acknowledge that she did. The central legal question is whether she was criminally responsible when she did it. Her defense contends that she was suffering from severe postpartum mental illness, including postpartum psychosis. Prosecutors maintain that the killings were deliberate and planned.

That is an enormously difficult question.

It is also the actual question.

You would not necessarily know this from the internet.

Everyone is a Detective Now

A substantial online community has instead become fascinated with Patrick Clancy, Lindsay’s husband at the time of the killings.

There are theories about his behavior. His statements. His relationships. His facial expressions. His life since the deaths.

There are people outright accusing him of killing his children despite Lindsay Clancy’s own defense, as well as Lindsay herself, acknowledging that she killed them. Recent reporting has documented how conspiracy theories accusing Patrick have spread alongside the trial even though the evidence being litigated concerns Lindsay’s criminal responsibility, not the identity of the killer.

Maybe this is what happens when true crime becomes entertainment. Eventually the actual crime is insufficiently entertaining.

We need a twist. The husband did it. The police are hiding something. There was a conspiracy. Someone on Reddit has enhanced a photograph.

I have bad news. Sometimes the facts are simply horrible.

And everyone obsessing over whether Patrick Clancy is secretly the killer is missing the most important story in this case.

The Story isn’t About Who Did It

The story is what happens when severe mental illness collides with a mental-health system that frequently lacks the capacity to deal with it.

Before Anyone Gets Angry, I Am Not Saying Lindsay Clancy Should Be Acquitted

This distinction matters. I am not arguing that Lindsay Clancy is legally insane. I am not on the jury. I have not reviewed every exhibit, heard every expert or sat through weeks of testimony.

There is evidence the prosecution believes demonstrates planning and intentional conduct. There is also evidence the defense says demonstrates profound psychiatric deterioration. Family members have testified about anxiety, paranoia, suicidal thoughts, fear of being alone and thoughts of harming the children before the killings. Evidence at trial has also included her internet searches concerning depression, suicidal ideation and postpartum psychosis.

The jury has to sort that out.

My Point is Different

Whatever verdict this jury returns, the Clancy case exposes a much larger problem with the way America deals with serious mental illness.

And those of us who work in criminal courts have been watching that problem grow for years.

Mental Illness Has Become Part of the Daily Criminal-Court Docket

When the public imagines criminal court, it tends to imagine criminals. Someone wants money, so he robs somebody. Someone gets angry, so he assaults somebody. Someone sells drugs.  Someone steals a car.

Those cases certainly exist. But spend enough time in a criminal courthouse and another population becomes impossible to ignore:

• People in psychosis.
• People with schizophrenia.
• People with bipolar disorder.
• People experiencing severe depression.
• People who are suicidal.
• People who cannot maintain medication.
• People who repeatedly decompensate.
• People whose families have been trying unsuccessfully to get them help.

People who end up receiving their most sustained contact with the government only after someone calls 911.

I have seen more and more of these cases over the course of my career, and I will admit that is anecdotal. 

But the national numbers point in the same direction.

The Mental-Health System Is Short on Mental-Health Professionals

Start with capacity.

As of June 30, 2026, the federal Health Resources and Services Administration listed 7,109 Mental Health Professional Shortage Area designations covering a designated population of 157,149,246 people.

According to HRSA, those shortage areas were meeting only 26.53% of their estimated mental-health-provider need.

HRSA calculates that another 7,825 practitioners would be necessary simply to eliminate the existing shortage designations.

That is not a rounding error.

It is a system operating with enormous holes in it.

We would consider this insane in almost any other area of medicine.

Imagine going to an emergency room with crushing chest pain and being told:

“We agree that you probably need a cardiologist. Unfortunately, the cardiology system is currently meeting 26.5% of estimated need. Have you considered journaling?”

Yet variations of that experience are routine in behavioral health.

Millions of Seriously Mentally Ill Americans Still Receive No Treatment

The newest federal data is just as troubling.

SAMHSA’s 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health estimates that 18.2 million American adults experienced serious mental illness during the previous year.

Only 67.7%—about 12.3 million people—received mental-health treatment.

Do the subtraction and roughly 5.9 million adults with serious mental illness received no mental-health treatment during the year.

These are not people who were stressed about work.  Not people having a bad Tuesday.

There are people meeting the federal survey’s definition of serious mental illness.

Now ask the obvious question:  What happens to people experiencing severe psychiatric illness when treatment doesn’t reach them?

Most do not commit crimes.

That point is critical. Mental illness should not be treated as a synonym for dangerousness.

But for some people, untreated or inadequately treated illness results in crisis.

And when crisis becomes public enough, disruptive enough or dangerous enough, America has another system standing by.

The criminal-justice system.

We Built a Criminal-Justice Safety Net Because the Mental-Health One Has Holes

The connection is visible in our prisons.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that approximately 43% of state prisoners reported a history of a mental-health problem.

Approximately 14% of state prisoners met the threshold for serious psychological distress during the 30 days before they were surveyed.

Again, those numbers do not prove that mental illness caused those individuals to commit crimes.

They do demonstrate that mental-health problems are massively present inside the population the criminal-justice system is being asked to manage.

And perhaps the clearest evidence of the growing burden is found in competency proceedings.

For non-lawyers, competency addresses whether a defendant is presently capable of understanding the proceedings and meaningfully assisting counsel. When someone is found incompetent to stand trial, the criminal case generally cannot move forward until competency is restored.

A June 2026 report from NRI examining state psychiatric hospital data found that from 2017 through 2024, the one-day census of adult patients classified as incompetent to stand trial increased 28.5% across the 25 states with comparable data.

Annual admissions of incompetent-to-stand-trial patients increased 25.2% across 26 states during that same period.

And Then We Make Them Wait

Here is where the system becomes almost absurd.

NRI surveyed 40 jurisdictions about competency restoration.

Thirty-two reported having an adult competency-restoration waitlist.

Among the states reporting waitlist counts, the average was 137 adults waiting in a typical month. The median was 48.

Georgia reported an average of 600 adults waiting.

Think About The Logic of This

The government arrests someone.

A court concludes that the person’s mental condition is so impaired that he cannot even meaningfully participate in his own defense.

What the System Says

“Excellent. We have identified the psychiatric problem.”

And immediately follows that with:

“Unfortunately, there’s a wait.”

The National Center for State Courts no longer speaks about this problem delicately. It says courts are confronting growing competency backlogs caused by limited treatment resources, staffing shortages and “the growing use of the competency process as a default response to mental illness in criminal cases.”

Read that last part again.

A default response to mental illness in criminal cases.

Translation: The mental-health system runs out of road.

So the courthouse takes over.

Welcome to America’s Most Expensive Mental-Health Program: Jail

This is an extraordinarily inefficient (and expensive) way to run a country.

We underfund or underbuild community treatment. Then someone deteriorates. A family calls police. Police respond. An arrest occurs.

Now we pay for:

• Police
• The jail
• A prosecutor
• A public defender
• A judge
• Court staff
• Mental-health evaluations
• Competency hearings
• Possible hospitalization
• Competency restoration
• More court appearances
• Potential incarceration

Then, eventually, reentry services designed to prevent the person from returning to the exact system we just spent an enormous amount of money putting him through.

Sometimes our Government is remarkably good at refusing to spend one dollar today so it can spend eight dollars next Thursday.

And That Brings Us Back to Lindsay Clancy

Postpartum psychosis is at the center of Clancy’s defense, though prosecutors dispute whether it rendered her legally not responsible.

What isn’t debatable is the seriousness of the condition itself.

The National Institute of Mental Health describes postpartum psychosis as a psychiatric emergency requiring hospitalization. That doesn’t tell the jury what happened inside Lindsay Clancy’s mind on January 24, 2023. It does tell us that postpartum psychiatric emergencies are real medical emergencies.

And the evidence being presented at this trial paints a picture of a woman whose mental health had become an enormous concern to the people around her before three children died. Her family has testified about suicidal thinking, fears of being alone, paranoia and thoughts of harming her children.

Maybe the jury ultimately concludes that she nevertheless understood what she was doing and bears full criminal responsibility.

That’s entirely possible.

But suppose that is the verdict.

Does that mean there is nothing to learn about her psychiatric treatment before the killings?

Criminal responsibility and healthcare failure are not mutually exclusive concepts.

A person can be legally responsible for a crime and the system designed to address mental illness can have failed spectacularly.

Treatment Is Public Safety

This is the policy point that gets lost.

Investing in mental-health care is not simply an act of compassion.

• It is crime policy
• It is policing policy
• It is corrections policy
• It is fiscal policy

Every psychiatric crisis successfully treated before someone becomes dangerous is a police call that may never occur.

Every person stabilized in the community is someone who may never enter a jail.

Every defendant diverted into effective treatment is potentially one fewer future victim, one fewer prosecution and one fewer expensive incarceration.

That doesn’t mean treatment prevents every crime – nothing does.

It means we should stop acting as though mental-health funding and public safety live on opposite sides of the government budget.

They are often purchasing the same thing at different stages.

The question is whether we want to pay before catastrophe or after catastrophe.

America has shown a remarkable preference for after.

The Wrong Mystery

There will continue to be people online examining Patrick Clancy’s every movement.

Someone will discover a photograph.

Someone will make a 47-part TikTok series.

Someone will say, “Look at his eyes.”

Someone else will announce that police missed the obvious clue, presumably because the Massachusetts State Police failed to consult a Facebook group.

Have fun.

But while everyone is playing Only Murders in Duxbury, here are the numbers that deserve considerably more attention:

·      157 million people are included in federally designated mental-health shortage areas.

·      18.2 million American adults experienced serious mental illness in 2025, and roughly 5.9 million received no mental-health treatment.

·      43% of state prisoners report a history of mental-health problems.

·      The population of incompetent-to-stand-trial patients in state psychiatric hospitals increased 28.5% in the states with comparable data between 2017 and 2024. Admissions increased 25.2%.

·      And 32 of 40 jurisdictions surveyed reported waitlists just to restore defendants to competency so their criminal cases could proceed.

Those numbers do not prove that inadequate mental-health treatment causes crime.

They prove something slightly different—and, in my view, equally troubling.

America has a massive mental-health treatment-capacity problem, and our criminal courts are increasingly being forced to deal with the consequences.

The Real Story

That is the story hiding underneath the Lindsay Clancy trial.

Do we really want police stations, county jails and criminal courthouses to remain major entry points into America’s mental-health system?

Because if the answer is no, we have to build something better.