by Kristy Romanowski, LPC, NCC, ACS
PhD in Transpersonal Psychology student
July 29, 2026 — Day three of testimony
Quick note: this is a live, ongoing trial, and everything here reflects reporting as of July 29, 2026. Testimony and details could keep developing before this wrap up
Today marks the third day of testimony in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial, the mom in Duxbury, Massachusetts, whose three kids, Cora (5), Dawson (3), and Callan (8 months), died in her care back in January 2023. Her defense isn’t trying to argue about what happened. They’re saying she was legally insane at the time…a severe case of postpartum illness on top of the effects of her own prescribed meds. The prosecution’s telling a totally different story: that this was planned. Deliberate. A jury of twelve women and six men has up to eight weeks to figure out which version they believe. I do know none of this is simple, and this case has been sitting in my chest for weeks now. I can’t shake it.
I’m a mom, a therapist, and someone who’s been through postpartum depression more than once, experiencing a miscarriage of twins, and an ectopic pregnancy before my children were born. This condition is very personal to me. When I applied to Sofia University for my PhD in 2023 the same time this tragedy occurred, transpersonal psychology was what pulled me in. For those who do not know, it’s the branch of psychology that takes spiritual, mystical, identity-shattering experiences seriously as real psychological events, not just symptoms you medicate away. I like to tell people it’s the study of all human experiences, the good, the bad, and the unimaginable.
Transpersonal psychology seemed to balance my own experiences with divorce, relationships, raising three kids, mental health, and trying to find solid ground. During this past year I’d drafted a dissertation proposal on postpartum depression once, then set it aside for something else, kind of quietly sure it would find its way back to me eventually. It did. My dissertation was wrapping up at almost the exact moment this case hit the news, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what her story is asking us to look at.
The context that matters…
Lindsay was a labor and delivery nurse. She literally stood on the clinical side of childbirth; knew professionally what postpartum bodies and minds go through. She had access to care. She used it. In the weeks before the event, her defense says she was on a heavy, shifting mix of psychiatric meds, and she’d been discharged from an inpatient psychiatric stay just 19 days before her kids died, a stay that reportedly included group therapy, some psychoeducation, art therapy. Apparently not enough. That night in January, after her kids were killed, she tried to end her own life by jumping from a window, after already cutting her wrists and throat. She survived. She’s paralyzed from the waist down now. Her trial got pushed back twice, first from December 2025, then again, while her legal team worked through evaluations with state-appointed physicians, a toxicologist, a psychopharmacologist. That alone says something about how tangled the medical picture is. It takes real expertise just to reconstruct what was happening in her body and brain that winter.
Postpartum psychosis, which is what her defense is centered on, is rare maybe one or two women in a thousand get it. Mainstream psychiatry calls it a medical emergency. But the system that names it an emergency doesn’t really treat it like one. Somewhere between 13 different medications and a 19-day gap in supervised care, something failed Lindsey, whether the law ends up deciding she’s responsible for what happened next. The much more common “baby blues” affects roughly 1 in 7 new moms, which is the a milder condition that fades in the first couple weeks. That distinction matters, because lumping PPD in with something almost universal downplays how serious and specific it really is, and how badly under-treated it remains. Only about half of women with PPD symptoms get adequate therapy, and the first move is almost always a prescription — SSRIs show up in something like 20-50% of treated cases, usually as the starting point rather than one piece of a bigger plan.
Stanislav Grof, one of the founders of transpersonal psychology, had a name for moments like this: a “spiritual emergency” a crisis so intense it can look just like a psychiatric breakdown from the outside. He wasn’t saying psychosis is safe or that biology doesn’t matter. He was saying that medicating someone into silence isn’t the same thing as helping them move through it. A spiritual emergency still needs safety, still needs real expert care. It just doesn’t need shame stacked on top.
The guilt that has no off switch…
Women carry guilt like background static that never fully shuts off, no matter what we do. Work too much, guilty. Don’t work enough, guilty. Raise your voice once and carry it for a week. Order McDonald’s because you’re too tired to cook, guilty. Take your meds, guilty; don’t take them right, guilty; ask for more help, guilty for needing it; try to prevent a tragedy and fail, and that guilt has nowhere left to go except into the coldest verdict there is: the court of public opinion, which convicts way faster than any jury and never grants parole. Lindsay is going to spend the rest of her life inside that verdict now too, no matter what the twelve women and six men in Plymouth County decide. Her mind will have its own sentence, separate from anything a judge hand down. A true living nightmare.
Toward a transpersonal resolution…
If there’s a resolution here, it’s not a legal one, that’s not mine to write, and it’s not even finished yet. The resolution I’m searching for is different: what would it mean to hold this story in a way that changes how we treat postpartum illness going forward? What happens once the jury goes home and the case fades from the daily media frenzy?
What can I do as a transpersonal researcher, to help prevent tragedies like this from ever happening again?
A transpersonal lens isn’t asking us to excuse harm or romanticize psychosis. It’s asking something harder, to stop treating the postpartum mind as something to manage into compliance and start seeing it as a threshold. One of the biggest psychological passages a person goes through. A more humane approach wouldn’t throw out medication or hospitalization. It would just wrap real support around mothers — the kind Lindsay’s 19 days apparently didn’t have enough of. Real relational care. Psychoeducation for the whole household, not just the patient. Closer monitoring after discharge, since the most dangerous window in perinatal psychiatric illness is consistently the weeks right after release, not the crisis itself. And honestly, the biggest thing: a culture that lets a mother say “I’m scared of my own mind right now” without that sentence costing her custody of her kids, her job, or her whole social world. Fear of that is one of the main reasons postpartum women hide their scariest thoughts instead of saying them out loud.
So maybe the resolution is this: Lindsay’s case doesn’t have to end with a verdict as its only meaning. It can also end separately, no matter what the jury decides, with a real shift in how we treat the postpartum period: as a genuine crisis, not just a chemical malfunction to fix and send home.
Her new life, alone, paralyzed, grieving her own kids, whether by her own hand or her illness, whichever the record ends up showing… is not going to be an easy life to find joy in. But if her story ends up being part of what finally builds a real, humane protocol for postpartum psychiatric emergencies in this country, then something survives the wreckage that wasn’t there before. That’s not justice. Maybe there is no true justice in this case. But it might lead to meaning. And sometimes meaning is the only thing left to build with.
Sources
Case facts, timeline, and trial reporting:
ABC News, “Ex-husband testifies in trial of mom accused of killing her 3 children” (July 27, 2026) — children’s deaths, ex-husband’s testimony, 911 call and first-responder details
CNN, “Day 2 of testimony in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial” (updated July 29, 2026) — not-guilty plea, children’s names/ages, defense’s non-responsibility argument, Patrick Clancy’s testimony
Turnto10/WJAR, “Lindsay Clancy’s ex-husband, Patrick, expected as prosecution’s first witness” (July 22, 2026) — jury composition, expected trial length, defense’s insanity strategy, prosecutor’s premeditation argument
Court TV, Lindsay Clancy trial coverage archive — overview of charges and defense’s postpartum psychosis claim
Yahoo News, “Lindsay Clancy trial set for 2026 as prosecutors seek husband’s statements to New Yorker” — paralysis from the fall, Tewksbury Hospital treatment, postpartum psychosis prevalence, Patrick Clancy’s public statements
Yahoo News, “Lindsay Clancy, Duxbury mom accused of killing her 3 kids, seeks to delay trial again” — trial delay history, insanity defense confirmation, overmedication claims
AOL, “Lindsay Clancy’s defense seeks two-phase murder trial” — pretrial motions, judge and defense attorney names, original July 20 trial start date
Postpartum depression prevalence:
CDC data cited via Psych Central and USAFacts — approximately 1 in 8 U.S. women report postpartum depressive symptoms
JAMA Network Open analysis of 440,000+ births — U.S. PPD diagnosis rate rising from 9.4% (2010) to 19.0% (2021)
Global meta-analyses (291 and 412 studies across dozens of countries) — pooled global PPD prevalence in the 17-19% range
