Warning: This story contains distressing details and discussion of attempted suicide A month before Lindsay Clancy killed her three children, she went to her mother and then-husband and told them she had "thoughts of harming the children". Clancy's mother Paula Musgrove testified this week that during that time her daughter would say: "'This isn't me, I've never been like this before.' And I would agree, because she wasn't," Musgrove said. Clancy is not disputing that she carried out the killings, but has pleaded not guilty to murder charges.
Her defence argues that Clancy was suffering from postpartum psychosis when she took her children's lives. Her symptoms included hallucinations and delusions that began after the birth of her third child. "She was unable to conform her behavior to the rule of law and she had no appreciation for the wrongfulness of her act," Paul Zeizel, a clinical and forensic psychologist, said on the stand on Wednesday.
Prosecutors, meanwhile, alleged she made a calculated decision to intentionally kill her children - Cora, five, Dawson, three, and Callan, who was eight months. With postpartum psychosis, which is considered a medical emergency, patients can experience mania, depression or a mixture of both. They also endure psychotic symptoms and in rare, severe cases, may harm or kill themselves or other people.
It is among the most serious illnesses a woman can experience after giving birth, experts told the BBC, but it remains unclassified in medicine's encyclopaedia of psychiatry. The illness is gaining more attention as Clancy's trial approaches the one-month mark, and has opened up a dialogue about the mental health complications that women can experience after giving birth. Meghan Cliffel was eight months postpartum from the birth of her second daughter when she began hallucinating.
It was a Friday in 2015 and she had just finished her workday in New York City. She became convinced that people were following her, she thought she was being recruited for a cult, and she thought the world - including her husband - was out to get her and her two daughters. Some 24 hours later, she was handcuffed to a gurney and taken to a psychiatric hospital.
She would go on to spend the next 12 days there receiving treatment for postpartum psychosis. The condition often presents with mood symptoms such as irritability, mood swings, insomnia and what medical professionals would call a delirium-like state, Susan Hatters-Friedman, forensic psychiatry professor at Case Western Reserve University, told the BBC. A patient often experiences psychiatric symptoms that appear rapidly, she said.
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