The case of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother accused of killing her three young children before attempting to take her own life, has stayed with me.
Not because I think what happened to those children was okay. It wasn’t. Three innocent children lost their lives, and nothing can change that.
But I can’t stop thinking about Lindsay as a person who was desperately trying to get help.
She asked for help.
She reached out to her family. She told people something was wrong. She sought psychiatric treatment. She was hospitalized. She was seeing medical professionals and taking medications that were prescribed to her.
So where was the safety net?
That’s the question I keep coming back to.
When someone is struggling this badly, who is looking at the entire picture?
Who is making sure the different doctors are communicating?
Who is looking at all of the medications being prescribed by different providers?
Who is checking for potential interactions, duplicate therapy, contraindications and other safety concerns?
Who is making sure that when a patient’s condition is getting worse, somebody recognizes it and says, “Something isn’t right. We need to stop and figure this out.”
Because the patient shouldn’t be expected to do that.
The patient is the one asking for help.
According to the medication records presented in court, Lindsay was prescribed 13 different psychiatric medications over approximately four months, with more than 30 prescriptions from multiple providers.
I’m not saying she was taking all 13 at the same time. There is no indication that she was, but there is also no way for me to say with certainty that she wasn’t. And that’s exactly why I have questions.
Who was keeping track of what she still had?
Who was making sure medications that had previously been prescribed weren’t being taken along with something new?
Who was coordinating all of this?
And where was the pharmacist in that safety process?
That’s not Lindsay’s job.
She wasn’t the psychiatrist. She wasn’t the nurse practitioner. She wasn’t the pharmacist. She wasn’t the pharmaceutical company.
She was the patient.
She went to professionals because she needed help. She trusted them to know what they were doing.
And according to testimony, she was telling people that something was wrong. She was experiencing frightening thoughts and concerns about her medications.
She was asking for help.
So why wasn’t someone stepping back and looking at the whole person instead of just treating the next symptom or writing the next prescription?
This is where my anger comes in.
I believe psychiatric treatment and medication can be incredibly important for people who need them. But treatment comes with a responsibility to the patient—to listen, to monitor, to communicate and to recognize when something isn’t working.
And that responsibility doesn’t belong to the patient.
It belongs to the doctors, psychiatric professionals, pharmacies, healthcare systems and pharmaceutical companies involved in that patient’s care.
I’m not saying medication caused Lindsay to kill her children. I don’t know that.
I’m saying that when someone is deteriorating while receiving psychiatric treatment, we have an obligation to look at everything.
Could something have been done differently?
Could someone have listened sooner?
Could the medications have been monitored more closely?
Could the different providers have communicated better?
Could she have received more intensive treatment?
Could this tragedy have been prevented?
I don’t know.
But I believe we owe it to those three children—and to every person who is begging for psychiatric help—to ask.
Because Lindsay’s story isn’t just about one woman.
There are people right now who are telling their doctors they’re getting worse.
They’re telling their families they’re scared.
They’re going to psychiatric hospitals because they know something is wrong.
They’re begging for help.
And yet people still fall through the cracks.
I don’t want Lindsay’s story to become another tragedy that dominates the news for a few weeks and then disappears.
I want accountability.
I want the medical professionals involved to ask what they could have done differently.
I want pharmacies to examine their role in medication safety.
I want pharmaceutical companies held accountable for how these medications are developed, promoted and monitored.
And I want the psychiatric community to take a hard look at whether we’re truly helping people when they are at their most vulnerable.
Because if everyone is responsible for one small piece of a patient’s care, but nobody is responsible for looking at the whole patient, then who is actually protecting that patient?
Where was the safety net?
And how many more people have to fall through it before we finally fix it?