A forensic psychologist has said he does not believe Lindsay Clancy was suffering from ‘command hallucinations’ when she killed her three children.
Clancy killed Cora, five, Dawson, three, and eight-month-old Callan, with resistance bands while her ex-husband Patrick Clancy was running errands.
While she does not deny killing the children, Clancy’s lawyer argues she should not be held criminally responsible because she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and taking powerful drugs to cope with depression at the time.
Forensic psychiatrist and filicide expert, Dr Phillip Resnick, testified on Friday that Lindsay was ‘clearly psychotic’ on the day she killed her children.
He went on to say that he believed Lindsay killed her children after experiencing ‘not only a command hallucination’ but also ‘a delusion of influence.’
A command hallucination is described as a symptom of mental illness in which a person hears an internal or external voice that explicitly instructs them to take specific actions.
As the trial contiues, Dr Kirk Heilbrun, who reportedly carried out psychiatric tests on Lindsay in April, told the court he questioned her claims that a hallucinated voice told her to carry out the killings.
Instead, he said he believes that the mother-of-three took their lives so that they would not ‘suffer’ after she killed herself.
During his testimony, he said: ‘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.
‘To put it mildly, that would be a very, very unusual pattern or manifestation of how this kind of thing comes about.’
He continued: ‘One of the things that she said when I asked about what happened, is that in the course of strangling each child, she said, “Go to God, baby. Go to God,”
‘That was part of her expectation that she and the children would be together in heaven with God.’
To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web
browser that
supports HTML5
video
After Dr Avram Mack, a forensic psychiatrist testified that he found no evidence of mania or hypomania to support a bipolar diagnosis or of psychosis, Dr Heilbrun said that he determined Lindsay has bipolar 2 disorder.
He added that it was difficult to diagnose, in part, ‘because of all the diagnoses in the records and all the symptoms that she experienced.’
Patrick, who has now married Dr Rachel Danis after divorcing Lindsay, also testified about his ex-wife’s deteriorating mental health leading up to the killings, saying that Lindsay had told him she had experienced thoughts of suicide as well as intrusive thoughts about hurting their children.
Lindsay sought help from specialists in postpartum mental health and was put on several medications before checking into a psychiatric hospital.
She was discharged from their care, and killed her children 19 days later on January 24, 2023.
Lindsay and Patrick have accused medical professionals of failing to properly diagnose, treat, and monitor her ahead of the deaths.
Prosecutors, however, allege that Lindsay deliberately sent Patrick out of their home on an errand to give her enough time to strangle the children to death with exercise resistance bands.