The prosecution of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother who strangled her three young children and then attempted to take her own life, is now with a jury that will determine whether or not she is criminally responsible for killing them. Countless pundits, pedestrians, practitioners and parents are arguing over the merits of the case, both online and IRL.
As much as the prosecution would like it to be otherwise, the Clancy case has morphed from a Rorschach test of whether she could understand the wrongfulness of her actions and control her conduct into something quite different. It has become a moment of reckoning on America’s mental health crisis, the “pill first” approach to treatment, systemic failures of perinatal care, and an inflexible legal system that’s more punitive than therapeutic. It only adds insult to tragedy to consider that America’s prison system, where Clancy could well find herself, already functions as the nation’s largest de facto mental health provider, where more than 40 percent of inmates have a history of psychiatric problems.
