Attorneys for Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts woman on trial for strangling her three young children in 2023, argued before a jury Tuesday that Clancy should not be held criminally responsible for their deaths. The 35-year-old former labor and delivery nurse, they said, had been experiencing postpartum psychosis, a rare and dangerous medical condition that alters a person’s perception of reality after childbirth.

At the time of the killings, Clancy had recently given birth to her third child. She reported intense feelings of anxiety and depression and sought psychiatric care. On Tuesday, her lawyer said Clancy had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and her husband, Patrick Clancy, said his wife had begun describing intrusive thoughts of harming herself and the children roughly a month before their deaths.

In a lawsuit filed last year, Patrick Clancy said Lindsay Clancy’s doctors had failed “to attend to her worsening psychiatric condition.”

She asked for help many, many times. I truly feel that her doctors are partially to blame for the death of these children.

I got that impression as well. She was an educated woman trying desperately to understand why she felt that way and how to stop it.