American ‘Mental Illness’ Is Actually Something Else

Lindsay Clancy woke up on the morning of Jan. 24, 2023, and told her husband she was feeling good. She had been struggling with postpartum depression and had been prescribed 13 psychiatric medications. A good night’s sleep had seemed to help, she said. Their five-year-old daughter, Cora, had a stomachache, so she took her to a pediatrician. After the morning appointment, she came home, built a snowman, and did art projects with the children. As evening approached, her husband, Patrick, left to grab takeout for the family’s dinner. When he returned, he found Lindsay unconscious in the backyard.

Patrick called 911. First responders arrived within about five minutes and found cuts on Lindsay’s wrists and neck, and she was paralyzed from the waist down. Cora and her brothers, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old Callan, were in the basement, unresponsive.

Elastic exercise bands had been tied around their necks.

Cora and Dawson were pronounced dead at the hospital that night. Three days later, Callan succumbed to his severe brain injury and died.

This was only the beginning of the parade of evil that follows Lindsay Clancy.

Lindsay Clancy was charged on three counts of murder, three counts of strangulation and three counts of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.

About two weeks later, she finally admitted the truth to her husband. She said that after Patrick left to get food, she “heard a voice and had a moment of psychosis.” She described the voice as a man’s, telling her to kill the children and herself while she had a chance. She then grabbed her own children, one by one, and those children struggled, tried just to breathe, but she murdered them. After that, she slashed her own wrists and jumped out a second-floor window.

The Clancy murder trial finally began on July 20, 2026. By then, her husband had divorced her, and her lawyers were arguing that yes, she choked the life out of her own babies, but she is not criminally responsible.

Why?

Because, they argue, she had “mental illnesses” including postpartum psychosis.

A murderer arguing that she should go free added another layer of evil, but a much thicker, much broader layer was about to be added.

The news of the mother murderer spread across the nation and beyond, horrifying many—but causing a different reaction among many others.

Online and in person, hundreds or thousands of women have spoken out in emotional and vocal support, not for the memory of those children or the now-divorced husband, but for the murderer.

#PeaceforLindsay. #Believe. #Sheneededhelp. #MetooLindsay.

You wanted to choke your five-year-old little girl to death, and your little three-year-old boy, and your eight-month-old baby. #SameLindsay.

More than 200 women dressed in pink and held a “Stand in Peace for Lindsay” vigil outside the courthouse in Plymouth County, Massachusetts. If the hope was that jurors would acquit her, they almost got their wish.

Add another layer of evil: After seven days of deliberation, 11 of the 12 jurors wanted to find Lindsay Clancy not criminally responsible for her murder of her children. One juror refused.

On September 4, the judge declared a mistrial. The three first-degree murder charges still stand, the perpetrator of those murders remains at Tewksbury Hospital without bail, and a September 29 hearing will decide what comes next.

An American mother murdered her own children with her own hands. How can that wretched evil not stop us in our tracks? And other American mothers support her. And American jurors want to save her from consequences and redefine what justice means!

What is wrong with us?

District Attorney Timothy Cruz put it plainly: “Children were murdered, and it is our job to seek justice.”

Talk about the murdering of the Clancy children almost immediately turns to “mental health” in almost every instance. The conversation goes back and forth about the vagaries and notions of depressions and psychoses.

Do women often experience serious issues in their thinking after they give birth? Yes. Can changing hormones amplify moods and thoughts? Yes. Are the behaviors real that psychiatrists try to define with syndromes, disorders and other mental health classifications? Yes.

But there is no physical explanation for bipolar or psychotic actions. Low progesterone does not cause you to hear voices. “Chemicals in the brain” don’t cause a mother to strangle her children.

Psychiatrists and others who try to define, classify, treat and excuse destructive and even outright murderous actions don’t even know what the mind is! Many of them will admit they don’t understand even the physical activity of the brain, and many will ignore or deny that there is a non-physical aspect, in addition to the brain, that constitutes the human mind.

Evil exists! And people who deny that it comes from the spiritual dimension of human life intentionally or inadvertently tolerate and proliferate that evil!

The instruction book for the human mind reveals exactly where “mental illness” comes from, with no vagaries, experimental treatments, baseless conjectures or other confusion.

“Mental illness” has to do with spiritual illness. One example from the Bible illustrates how people used to understand this fact of human existence.

Matthew 17, Mark 9 and Luke 9 record a parent-child relationship involving a different but still heartbreaking circumstance. A boy was suffering seizures, foaming at the mouth, trying to drown himself, even throwing himself into fire on one or more occasions. Imagine being that child’s father.

These accounts actually record a little bit about this anguished, desperate father, relaying that he brought that boy to Jesus and explained what was evident by the boy’s actions—his mind was afflicted by an unclean spiritual influence. It was clear not only to Jesus but to the father and to many others that the boy had been possessed by a demon.

The Bible clearly reveals that evil exists, its source exists, that that source is a real individual being, that that being commands many lesser demons (like the one that afflicted this boy), and that even though the average person doesn’t act like this boy or like Lindsay Clancy, we are influenced by these evil beings! That is why our world is so evil—not only because of the evil in people’s minds in these extreme and more obvious cases, but in the average person.

Your Bible says that Satan is real, is the “god of this world,” “deceives the whole world,” broadcasts his attitudes through “the power of the air,” and tempts and influences all of us to commit evil—sin.

All these demons recorded in the Bible did not disappear. They remain here among human beings causing people to have seizures, to foam at the mouth, to try to kill themselves, to strangle their own children, to support those who strangle their own children—and to follow Satan’s attitudes in far more subtle, far more pervasive ways.

The Bible clearly reveals that evil spirits can gain control over a person’s mind or body if the person willingly surrenders control of their mind. Taking recreational drugs or psychiatric medications are two of the ways this can happen.

The Federalist reports that in 1950, roughly 580,000 Americans were receiving long-term hospital care for mental illness. By 2022 that number had grown to 1.65 million. Surveys indicate that 72 percent of Gen Z Americans believe they have a mental illness—and 60 percent of them are taking altering drugs as treatment. Not all of these people are possessed to the extent Lindsay likely was when she strangled her children, but declining mental health comes from declining spiritual health.

Lindsay Clancy is still fully responsible for what spiritual influences she let into her mind and should therefore be convicted of the triple homicide she perpetrated. But the real issue behind her horrifying actions is not postpartum depression. It is our whole “mental illness” culture, where we treat inner voices as a psychiatric diagnosis, every crime as a symptom, and every surrendered mind as a victim.

“[W]e wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Ephesians 6:12).