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On the evening of January 24th 2023, Lindsay Clancy sent her husband Patrick out to run a few errands. He was gone for less than an hour. During that time, Lindsay strangled her three young children to death with exercise bands. She then slashed her own neck and wrists before jumping out of her second-story bedroom window. The fall left her paralyzed from the waist down. She later claimed that she’d experienced an auditory command hallucination; a man’s voice had instructed her to kill her children, and she obeyed.
This suburban horror story has become the American courtroom drama of the moment; the trial, which began last month, is a TikTok phenomenon. True Crime influencers and “forensic astrologers” have become merchants of viral conspiracies and misinformation. A subreddit dedicated to the tragedy now gets more than 300K visitors weekly. The murders have become a fixture of social media discourse and a lightning rod for some of the most contentious issues at the dark, shriveled heart of American life: SSRIs, personal responsibility, mental illness, culture war gender politics, and the abysmal state of American medicine, psychiatry in particular.
The case was probably destined to become an object of perverse interest. The telegenic Clancy family lived in a colonial-style house in Duxbury, Massachusetts, a well-to-do suburb of Boston that locals jokingly refer to as “Luxbury”. The Clancy’s three children–Cora, age 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months–were periodically cared for by a nanny. Patrick worked for Microsoft, and Lindsay was a delivery room nurse. Photos posted to social media revealed a seemingly enviable life typical of the coastal blue state middle class.
But in the months leading up to the murders, Lindsay’s mental health started to deteriorate, and she sought psychiatric help for anxiety and insomnia. In an initial telehealth appointment in September 2022, a young psychiatrist named Jennifer Tufts wrote Lindsay a prescription for the anti-depressant Zoloft, a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI). The Zoloft reportedly made her worse. Over the next few months, Lindsay was prescribed 13 more psychiatric drugs. By the end of the year, she was experiencing suicidal ideation, and she checked herself into McLean hospital. A few weeks after being discharged, she killed her children. Lindsay has pleaded not guilty, arguing lack of responsibility–the legal term for the insanity defense in Massachusetts. Her defense rests on the assertion that she was suffering from post-partum psychosis at the time of the murders, and that her condition was exacerbated by psychiatric drugs. Both Lindsay and Patrick have also filed separate lawsuits against her psychiatric team.
When Dr. Tufts took the stand earlier this month, the entire field of psychiatry was on trial. The young doctor fumbled over her notes and struggled to provide answers to Lindsay’s defense attorney, who sometimes demanded that she answer for the entire profession and its increasingly shoddy practices, including telehealth and digitized medical notes. Observing the exchange, some in the mental health field worried that patients would be even more reluctant to take SSRIs. Others have asserted that the case has set the field of psychiatry back “decades”.
Meanwhile, psychiatry has already been under sustained attack since Trump appointed Robert Kennedy Jr. Health Secretary last year. SSRIs in particular have become emblematic of everything the right hates: they are disproportionately used by women, who take them about twice as much as men. They sap patients of “vitality” by promoting weight gain and tanking the libido. When they work, they are seen as the “easy” way out, a short cut that deprives people of supposedly ennobling suffering. In recent years, Kennedy has repeatedly said that SSRIs contribute to school shootings. The administration now formally champions “deprescribing”–patient withdrawal from psychiatric drugs, which Kennedy says is harder than quitting heroin. In May, he hosted a “Mental Health and Overmedicalization Summit” where he said “we will no longer treat [psychiatric medications] as the default.” Popular YouTube psychiatrist Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring, an associate of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiative, has launched something called the Taper Clinic to wean patients off psychiatric drugs; rates for this service begin at $30,000. Big Pharma is a racket but there is clearly money to be made in the emergent deprescribing industry too.
The anti-SSRI campaign is just one part of a broader offensive.