Lindsay Clancy Never Showed Signs of Acute Psychosis: Her Own Psychiatrists
Lindsay Clancy, the woman who killed her three children in 2023, never showed signs of acute psychosis prior to the killings, according to three psychiatrists and a forensic psychologist who testified during her first trial.
Forensic psychologist Kirk Heilbrun testified in August that it was “very unusual” for Clancy to only experience a hallucination from her alleged psychosis one single time.
“The way she described this as happening is that she heard a voice that she’d never heard before — experienced a hallucination — and she’s never experienced it since,” Heilbrun noted in court.
“But she only experienced it for the 18 minutes or so that it took to kill the children,” he continued. “To put it mildly, that would be a very, very unusual pattern or manifestation of how this kind of thing comes about. Very unusual.”
This is the best witness yet.
“She heard a voice that she never heard before, and she never experienced it since, but she only experienced it for the 18 minutes that it took to kill her children. And to put it mildly that is very unusual. Very very unusual. I’m always very… pic.twitter.com/Axa2jm18FR
— Lisa Marie (@LisaNIRL) August 24, 2026
Heilbrun never treated Clancy, but two of the psychiatrists, Alia Goodheart and Jennifer Tufts, testified similarly in August after having previously treated her.
Goodheart treated Clancy during a voluntary five-day stay at an inpatient hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, according to People magazine. She said in court that her initial diagnosis for Clancy was “major depressive disorder, severe without psychotic features.”
“I did not have any concerns about her safety or a risk for anybody else,” Goodheart testified, adding that Clancy had shown no signs of psychosis during her treatment.
Tufts began treating Clancy in September of 2022, which was roughly four months after she gave birth to her third child. The treatment continued through January 2023, when Clancy killed her three kids.
“Tufts said throughout her testimony that Clancy never exhibited any signs of psychosis or mania during her treatment,” according to USA Today.
#LindsayClancy #LindsayClancyTrial
Dr Jennifer Tufts testified today. She is a licensed psychiatrist who treated Lindsay Clancy for severe postpartum mental health disorders. She worked with Lindsay before she entered McLean.
She testified that she first evaluated Lindsay… pic.twitter.com/0D0xjyh4j3
— Adriienne F (@imadriienne) August 7, 2026
A third expert, forensic psychiatrist Dr. Avram Mack, never treated Clancy, but did testify in late August that he found no evidence of psychosis leading up to the killings of Clancy’s children, according to NewsNation.
“It’s your understanding from reviewing her medical records that Lindsay never indicated that she was not participating in reality, that she was in a dissociated state, that she was out of touch with reality?” Clancy’s attorney, Kevin Reddington, asked Mack in court. “You’re telling this jury you never saw that?”
“I did see that evidence and that component. I don’t see that as a sign, strictly speaking, of psychosis,” Mack fired back. “It may have been in some cases, but I don’t see any signs of psychosis or delusion.”
Although the first trial concluded last week with a mistrial, critics suspect prosecutors will lean in hard on the testimony from Heilbrun, Goodheart, Tufts, and Mack during her next trial.
The defense also had witnesses, including Dr. Phillip Resnick, a forensic psychiatrist and expert in filicide. Though he never treated Clancy, he argued that the evidence showed she was “clearly psychotic” when she killed her kids.
“It was almost like she was a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings,” he testified.
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