20/08/2026
I have been following the Lindsay Clancy trial lately — listening to court coverage, lives, podcasts and conversations online — and something about the commentary surrounding this case is absolutely blowing my fu***ng mind.
People keep saying:
Surely this case will finally make people talk about mental health.
Surely this will make people look at how we diagnose and treat severe psychiatric illness.
Surely this will make people listen when somebody repeatedly says, “I am not okay.”
Surely this will make us look at maternal mental health and postpartum psychiatric illness.
And I keep thinking:
What the f**k does it actually take?
How many catastrophes do we need before we stop saying this will be the one that changes things?
Because none of this is new.
Lindsay Clancy is a Massachusetts nurse who does not dispute killing her three young children — Cora, Dawson and Callan — in January 2023. Her defence argues that she was suffering from severe mental illness and was not criminally responsible for what she did. The prosecution disputes that.
I am not sitting here pretending I know exactly what happened inside that woman’s mind.
I don’t.
I wasn’t there. I haven’t heard every piece of evidence. And ultimately, a court will determine the legal questions.
But there is another question here that doesn’t require us to decide whether Lindsay Clancy is guilty or not guilty:
How can somebody be surrounded by mental-health treatment and still become catastrophically unwell?
Because seeking help and actually receiving effective help are not the same fu***ng thing.
And that, I know something about.
I am 47 years old, and mental illness has been part of my life for almost as long as I can remember.
I have diagnoses. I have decades of medical history. I know my medications. I know what happens when I deteriorate. I have been compliant with treatment. I have spent a significant portion of my life interacting with psychiatrists, psychologists, hospitals and the mental-health system.
And I am still frightened of becoming unwell enough to need psychiatric admission.
Not because I’m frightened of psychiatric illness.
I’m frightened of psychiatric healthcare.
A few years ago, after an extremely significant relationship breakdown, I became very unwell. I had weaned myself off medications that I had taken for approximately 25 years.
I ended up admitted to hospital.
That hospital had my history.
I had been admitted there previously.
My long-term psychiatrist could have been contacted.
There was decades of information available about me.
And yet, over approximately seven days, I saw four different locum psychiatrists.
And four different psychiatrists changed my medication.
Four.
In a week.
I wasn’t an unknown patient presenting with absolutely no history. I was a person with a longstanding, documented psychiatric condition and decades of treatment behind me.
Two medications they prescribed were medications I was allergic to.
Another was lamotrigine.
I subsequently became physically unwell and developed a visible rash. Eventually, approximately 1,600–1,800 kilometres away, I ended up in a private psychiatric hospital on the Gold Coast where clinicians looked at what was happening and told me to stop taking it immediately.
Lamotrigine can, in rare cases, cause extremely serious and potentially life-threatening skin reactions.
And here is the terrifying part.
I was expected to navigate all of this while I was the psychiatric patient.
Think about how fu***ng ridiculous that is.
When somebody becomes severely mentally unwell, we often place an extraordinary administrative and cognitive burden on the very person whose ability to cope may be collapsing.
Remember your medication.
Explain your entire psychiatric history.
Remember what happened twenty years ago.
Tell this doctor.
Now tell another doctor.
Explain it again to the nurse.
Advocate for yourself.
Know which medication doesn’t work.
Know which one made you sick.
Recognise when something isn’t right.
Make phone calls.
Get referrals.
Wait.
Explain yourself again.
Prove you’re sick enough to require help — but remain organised, rational and articulate enough to successfully obtain that help.
And God help you if you’re distressed, angry, confused, frightened or unable to communicate properly.
Because suddenly those symptoms of mental illness can become reasons not to listen to you.
We need to stop confusing treatment with care.
A person can see ten psychiatrists and still receive terrible psychiatric care.
A person can take medication and still receive terrible psychiatric care.
A person can go to hospital and still receive terrible psychiatric care.
A person can repeatedly ask for help and still not receive the help they actually need.
And when something finally goes catastrophically wrong, everybody looks backwards and asks:
Why didn’t somebody do something?
Sometimes the person themselves was screaming that something was wrong.
That is one of the things about the Clancy case that I find so confronting.
Whatever the court ultimately determines about Lindsay’s criminal responsibility, the evidence surrounding her deterioration and her extensive contact with mental-health services deserves serious examination.
Because three children are dead.
Their mother survived an apparent su***de attempt with devastating injuries.
An entire family was destroyed.
We should be capable of examining whether opportunities for intervention were missed without pretending that doing so somehow diminishes the horror of three children losing their lives.
Both things can matter.
And then there’s stigma.
I can say something that sounds completely absurd, but it’s true:
Sometimes I find it easier to tell people I’m a medium than to tell them I have bipolar disorder.
Think about that.
In 2026.
Tell someone you have diabetes and they generally don’t reconsider your intelligence, credibility, parenting ability or capacity to make decisions.
Tell someone you have a significant psychiatric diagnosis and watch what can happen.
Suddenly people speak more slowly to you.
Your anger isn’t anger anymore — it’s your illness.
Your sadness isn’t sadness — it’s your illness.
If you disagree with somebody, perhaps you’re unstable.
If you advocate strongly for yourself, perhaps you’re manic.
If you’re frightened about your treatment, perhaps you lack insight.
And once somebody decides that you’re the mentally ill person, sometimes everything you say gets filtered through that label.
That’s not healthcare.
And it’s certainly not dignity.
The most frustrating thing is that we’ve been here before.
This isn’t humanity’s first encounter with severe mental illness.
This isn’t our first tragedy involving postpartum psychiatric illness.
This isn’t our first inquiry.
It isn’t our first devastated family.
It isn’t our first promise that something has to change now.
So when I hear people saying that the Lindsay Clancy case might finally make society wake up and start talking about mental health, part of me wants to scream.
Where the f**k have we all been?
We have been talking.
Patients have been talking.
Families have been talking.
People experiencing mental illness have been telling us what is wrong with the system for decades.
Maybe the problem isn’t that nobody has spoken.
Maybe the problem is that we haven’t listened to the people who actually live it.
I have met some wonderful mental-health professionals. People who listened, understood and treated me like an intelligent adult who happened to have an illness rather than an illness that happened to have a body attached to it.
But across almost five decades of living with mental illness, I can count the truly exceptional ones on one hand.
That shouldn’t be acceptable.
I don’t want another horrific case to become the reason we spend six months talking about mental health before everyone moves on.
I don’t want another documentary.
Another hashtag.
Another promise that this time we’ll learn.
I want continuity of psychiatric care.
I want clinicians to read the fu***ng notes.
I want patients’ knowledge of their own illness to matter.
I want medication histories taken seriously.
I want someone to take responsibility for coordinating care when multiple clinicians are involved.
I want mothers experiencing severe postpartum psychiatric symptoms to be taken seriously before they become emergencies.
I want people to be able to say, “Something is happening inside my mind and I’m frightened,” without having to deteriorate further before somebody decides they’re sick enough to deserve intervention.
And most importantly, I want us to stop waiting until there’s a body count before asking whether the mental-health system failed somebody.
Three little children should still be alive.
Whatever a jury ultimately decides about their mother’s criminal responsibility cannot change that.
But if we’re going to say that their deaths must teach us something, then for God’s sake, let it be more than another conversation.
Listen to people before they become a tragedy.
Not afterwards.
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