“Medication stole my motherhood and my life.”
The text briefly flashed on a screen in a Massachusetts courtroom last week as its author, 36-year-old Lindsay Clancy, sat in a wheelchair next to her lawyer. She is the defendant awaiting the verdict in a murder trial over the killings of her three kids — 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan — whom she admits to fatally strangling with exercise bands in January 2023.
Clancy argues that she was experiencing postpartum psychosis — a rare psychiatric emergency that can affect women after childbirth — at the time of the killings. She is mounting an insanity defense, which would commit her to a state-run psychiatric facility with the opportunity for release in the future. Prosecutors, meanwhile, are pursuing a murder conviction and a life sentence. They allege that she planned the killings, sending her then-husband out for errands and staging what they characterize as a half-hearted suicide attempt — which left her partially paralyzed — after killing the kids.
The note displayed in court, during the testimony of a forensic expert who examined her phone, is the most detailed account of her mental state prior to the killings, in her own words. And in Clancy’s telling, it was the antidepressants and other medications she was prescribed in the months prior to the killings that drove her deterioration.
“I was the healthiest, happiest mom,” read the note, written in December 2022. “I worked out every morning, meditated, and took care of myself so I could be the best for my kids. Until prescription medication stole me from my own body.”
The complexity of the case has ignited national debates about culpability and maternal mental health. Clancy’s mother, sister and former in-laws have all testified that she was a dedicated, loving mother whose mental health did not rapidly decline until she began seeking treatment for her depression. Her lawyer, Kevin Reddington, points to more than a dozen medications she was prescribed by various doctors in the months before January 2023. Experts for the prosecution, meanwhile, have testified that Clancy was on fairly low doses of the medications and frequently changed doctors and prescriptions before her treatments could prove effective. Prosecutors also alleged that phone records show that she mapped out how long her husband would be gone the night of the killings.
Allies of the Make America Healthy Again movement, though, have eschewed the nuanced evidence and instead argue that the case proves a simple thesis, one that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other federal health officials have also been arguing for a while: Antidepressants are dangerous, and their use should be curbed.
MAHA supporters including Alex Clark, host of Turning Point USA’s wellness podcast “Culture Apothecary,” and Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization that Kennedy previously led, have argued that the case effectively — and rightfully — puts what Clark calls “the antidepressant industry” on trial.
In a YouTube video about the case with 14,000 views, Roger McFillin, a psychologist who spoke on a Food and Drug Administration panel last summer arguing for a stronger warning on antidepressants for pregnant women, called Clancy’s providers “drug dealers.” He added: “In my opinion, they were drugging this woman into oblivion and calling it healthcare.”
Kim Witczak, a self-described “drug safety advocate” who spoke at a MAHA Institute panel on “mental health and overmedicalization” in May, has also been continually commenting on the case on social media. “Throwing pills at people in hopes something sticks is NOT treatment,” she wrote in a post to her more than 12,000 followers on X earlier this month.
Even some MAHA-aligned voices who have been more circumspect in their analyses of the case, such as Dr. Phil McGraw and MAHA influencer and conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey, have argued that it illustrates, as Stuckey put it, that “doctors don’t take seriously enough the danger of SSRIs.” Stuckey was referring to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most commonly prescribed form of antidepressants.
But experts in psychiatry and perinatal mood disorders say these broad characterizations obscure the complexities of the case, the pervasiveness of perinatal mood disorders — postpartum depression affects about 1 in 8 women, and mental illness is the leading underlying cause of pregnancy-related deaths nationwide — and the roles that medication and other evidence-based resources can play in alleviating symptoms. Experts also suggest that untreated mental illness during pregnancy poses a larger threat to the health of women and babies than the use of antidepressants.
“When biased voices that are not based on science are amplified, and evidence-based interventions are labeled as harmful, they’re missing the risks of untreated mental health disorders,” Wendy Davis, president and CEO of the nonprofit Postpartum Support International, told MS NOW.
But these voices are already influential: They have the ears of the nation’s top health officials. Their arguments reveal how the MAHA movement’s dismissal of psychiatry relies on both the spread of misinformation as well as the intensive labor of mothers to manage their own, and their children’s, mental and emotional well-being.
“They’re not only just saying things,” Emily Wood, a practicing psychiatrist and co-chair of the Southern California Psychiatric Society’s government affairs committee, said of the MAHA commentators. “They are taking actions.”
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Before Clancy’s note saying “medication stole my life” was shown in court, the lengthy list of medications she had been prescribed — antidepressants including Zoloft, Prozac and Remeron, alongside anti-anxiety medications such as Ativan and Klonopin — was publicized by her defense. Clancy and her ex-husband, Patrick, are also pursuing cases against several of her former providers in civil lawsuits, alleging that doctors failed to properly diagnose and treat her mental illness. The providers have denied wrongdoing, and two have testified at the trial.
Clancy and her ex-husband’s politics are unclear, and neither has indicated that they believe antidepressants should be broadly curbed. But it’s not hard to see why MAHA allies have rallied around the Clancy case.
“The MAHA agenda has always been to get rid of vaccines and get rid of psychiatric medications,” Tyler Black, an emergency psychiatrist and a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, told MS NOW.
Kennedy’s disdain for antidepressants is well known. A former heroin addict, he has argued that SSRIs are harder to quit than heroin — a claim addiction experts dispute. He has also baselessly alleged that the use of SSRIs has contributed to school shootings and suggested people who use antidepressants should be sent to “wellness farms” to wean themselves off the drugs.
After Kennedy’s elevation to health secretary in Trump’s second term, his personal feelings guided national policy discussions.
Last summer, the FDA hosted a panel on the use of SSRIs in pregnancy, and several of the 10 panelists called for the agency to put a black box warning on the drugs specifically for pregnant women. Experts, though, have concerns that this could make women with perinatal mental illnesses — which are already often underdiagnosed — more reluctant to take medication or seek help.
In May, Kennedy laid out a broader plan to curb what he characterized as the general “overprescribing” of antidepressants. In a “Dear Colleague” letter distributed to providers, HHS officials said providers should focus on offering “non-pharmacological interventions” to patients — especially pregnant and postpartum people — when possible, such as exercise, sleep, and behavioral therapy.
Professional organizations, including the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists, largely rejected the characterization of antidepressants as being overprescribed — federal data suggests up to 16% of adults report using the medications — and argued that the more significant problem facing patients is inadequate access to care.
Nonetheless, last month Stat first reported that federal health officials met with “dozens of mental health professionals” over the course of two days to form guidance to instruct providers how to taper off antidepressants. That guidance has yet to be released.
Spokespeople for the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to several questions from MS NOW for this story.
Underlying MAHA allies’ insistence that the use of antidepressants should be curbed are arguments that the drugs are difficult to quit and can cause intense withdrawal symptoms — including violence — when stopped, claims that scientific evidence broadly contradicts.
A meta-analysis of 79 randomized controlled trials covering more than 20,000 patients, published in Lancet Psychiatry in 2024, found that while 31% of people reported at least one symptom after discontinuing their medications, only 3% had severe symptoms. More commonly reported symptoms of stopping SSRI use include dizziness, nausea and insomnia, while more severe symptoms can include suicidal ideation or mania. Psychiatrists generally say patients who want to stop their medications should work with their provider to slowly decrease their dosage over time.
“Most people I’ve stopped medications for have had no problems,” said Black, the emergency psychiatrist, “but [MAHA allies] are talking about it like it’s a guaranteed thing.”
Those who follow the movement’s messaging say this is not uncommon. The way MAHA allies talk about psychiatry is “how they’ve talked about other issues, like vaccines and ultra-processed foods and food dyes,” said Norah MacKendrick, a sociologist at Rutgers University who has written about MAHA’s communication strategies. “In their understanding, natural is always better, synthetic is bad … and the root cause, in their view, is corruption in the medical establishment.”
Much of the work of avoiding this so-called corruption falls to mothers rather than medical professionals or government agencies. Trump, for example, told moms to “tough it out” and avoid Tylenol during pregnancy for fear it could cause autism — a claim unsupported by evidence — and MAHA influencers have urged moms to cook their family’s meals from scratch, and with organic ingredients.
“In general, their movement encourages women and mothers to do their own research on everything to do with maternal health and their children’s health,” MacKendrick said.
When it comes to postpartum depression, some of the same MAHA figures weighing in on the Clancy case would also prefer struggling pregnant women and new moms to “tough it out.”
McFillin, who has been a prolific commenter on the Clancy case, suggested on the FDA panel last summer that women who believe they are experiencing depression may “just naturally [be] experiencing their emotions more intensely, and those are gifts. They’re not symptoms of a disease.” In his YouTube video about the Clancy case, he also said her high score on a widely used postpartum depression screening test “should be meaningless.” He did not respond to a request for comment from MS NOW.
Kay Roussos-Ross, an obstetrician-gynecologist and the director of the Perinatal Mood Disorders program at the University of Florida College of Medicine, was the only expert among the 10 panelists at the FDA event last year who spoke to the importance of SSRIs in pregnancy. Roussos-Ross recently told MS NOW that “it would be a tragedy — a travesty — for patients to be worried about being on medication to help treat their symptoms” based on the other panelists’ comments in light of the Clancy trial. That’s especially true for women dealing with postpartum psychosis, she added, which requires prompt treatment with medication including lithium or antipsychotics to prevent the worst possible outcomes.
But anecdotal reports suggest that for some women, the confusion caused by Trump administration officials and MAHA influencers is already making it more difficult to find the path to recovery.
Davis, from Postpartum Support International, said the staffers who operate the organization’s help line have heard from several callers who say social media commentary about the Clancy trial is “sometimes causing so much confusion that women are not pursuing treatment that includes medication, or going off their medication.”
Davis does not agree with those voices — but she understands why they may be convincing.
“They offer a passionate voice that says, ‘we understand you, we’re not going to medicalize you,’” she said, “and it’s very compelling to people, because we want to be the most human we can.”
Some women are turning to people like Josef Witt-Doerring, a psychiatrist who has spoken at length about the Clancy case. That includes a YouTube video with over 1 million views in which he argues that Clancy’s medications pushed her into psychosis, as she argues in her civil lawsuit. Witt-Doerring also participated in last summer’s FDA panel, and he runs a 12-month “drug tapering program” that costs more than $30,000.
In an interview with MS NOW, Witt-Doerring said that while he believes that postpartum depression is real and that there are “benefits to taking antidepressants,” he also believes the Clancy case proves the need to improve psychiatric care — in part, by talking more about the serious side effects of medications.
“We can’t hide the harms,” Witt-Doerring said, “even if they’re rare.”
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We may never know what exactly was going through Clancy’s mind when she killed her kids. But several psychiatric experts agree: Placing the blame on any one factor, including antidepressants, is likely too simplistic.
They point to several factors they speculate could have contributed to the way the tragedy unfolded, including the fact that Clancy saw several different providers in the months prior to the killings who were not always communicating with one another. She also repeatedly sought care in emergency rooms, where she encountered new providers who may not have had her full medical history, and through suicide hotlines, where she was turned away because she lacked a plan for self-harm. The rarity of postpartum psychosis may have also made it harder for her providers to recognize the seriousness of her potential symptoms.
“None of us are very familiar with postpartum psychosis,” Roussos-Ross said, speaking about ob-gyns generally, “because we don’t see it very commonly.”
But for MAHA mouthpieces, offering a simple answer to a confounding question that a friend of Clancy’s says she herself once posed — how could a mother hurt her children? — may be exactly the point.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or chat live at 988lifeline.org. You can also visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional support.
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.
