Terrifying truth about antidepressants drugs so many are unaware of: KATINKA BLACKFORD NEWMAN went through a horrific psychosis and depression. Now, a top expert reveals one of the ‘best-guarded secrets’ in psychiatry

There is a murder trial currently gripping the US. At its centre is a 36-year-old mother, paralysed from the waist down after jumping from an upstairs window – occasionally sobbing as a jury hears how before she jumped, she’d strangled her three young children.

Lindsay Clancy, a former nurse from Massachusetts, is accused of killing five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson and eight-month-old Callan in the basement of their family home in 2023 – she then jumped from a window in an apparent suicide attempt that left her paraplegic.

The defence does not dispute that Lindsay killed her children, but argues she is not guilty by reason of insanity.

Much of its case centres on whether Lindsay was suffering from postpartum psychosis, a rare and severe condition that can occur after childbirth.

But another strand runs through the evidence: the possible role of the psychiatric medications she was prescribed beforehand.

Lindsay was originally prescribed the SSRI sertraline in September 2022, three months after the birth of her youngest son, to help with anxiety and insomnia as her maternity leave was ending.

The dose was increased to 50mg after a week and she suffered dramatic side-effects – going 48 hours without sleep, racing thoughts and worsening anxiety.

Although she came off it the next day, over the following four months – from October 2022 to January 2023 – she was prescribed 13 different psychiatric drugs, including antidepressants, antipsychotics, benzodiazepines and sleeping medication.

Her defence lawyer, Kevin Reddington, had asked the judge to let the jury consider ‘involuntary intoxication’, arguing that the prescribed medication and the effects of stopping it could have contributed to her state of mind. The judge turned down his request.

But the drugs remained part of the defence case: In his closing argument, Kevin Reddington blamed the tragedy in part on ‘the damn medicine and the lousy medical care that she got’.

What happened inside the Clancy home on the evening of January 24, 2023, is not disputed. What was happening inside Lindsay’s mind is at the heart of the trial.

Lindsay has repeatedly said that after her husband Patrick left the house, she heard a loud male voice commanding: ‘This is your last chance. Kill the children so you can kill yourself’, an account she gave to psychiatric experts who evaluated her, and to others, including her husband after she killed them.

She describes a force coming over her and entering a dissociative, ‘dream-like state’: ‘I lost all control. My body started acting without any control on my part.’

Dr Phillip Resnick, a forensic psychiatrist and expert in filicide (the killing of children by a parent) testified to the court that Lindsay was ‘clearly psychotic’ when she killed her children and not in control of her actions, likening her to a ‘puppet’ with someone else ‘pulling the strings’.

It is for the jury to decide whether Lindsay deliberately murdered her children – or was in such a profoundly altered mental state that she could not be held criminally responsible.

Whatever the verdict, this case has a deeply personal resonance for me – Lindsay’s account, the sense of being compelled to act, the attempt to kill herself, mirrors something I have experienced myself.

As I watched her sitting in that courtroom, I couldn’t help but think: That woman could have been me.

Fourteen years ago, aged 47, after being prescribed psychiatric medications the same or similar to some of Lindsay’s, I suffered a severe adverse drug reaction: I had beliefs and impulses utterly alien to me, including the conviction that I had killed my children, then aged 11 and 12.

I survived. My children survived. And when the drugs wore off, those beliefs disappeared – and have never returned.

My own story began, as Lindsay’s did, with something unremarkable: I couldn’t sleep.

Navigating a divorce and the sale of our family home, sleepless nights and anxiety took me to a doctor, who prescribed two antidepressants – escitalopram and mirtazapine – as well as the sleeping tablet zopiclone, to take all together.

Within hours I developed extreme agitation, worsening insomnia and akathisia, an agonising state of intense inner restlessness.

Within days my mind tipped into a terrifying psychosis with hallucinations: I thought I was being filmed as part of a game show where everyone was voting on who was the better parent – me or my ex – and I was losing.

Worst of all I had a conviction I had killed my children that drove me to stab myself with a kitchen knife.

My sister, who had been alerted to what was happening, took me to a psychiatric hospital, where I remained psychotic for two more days, refusing to watch TV – convinced the news would report I had killed my children.

Most chillingly, I calmly told a psychiatrist I intended to kill myself because I had made a suicide pact with God so my ex-husband could have the children.

After two days in hospital, as the drugs left my system, the psychosis disappeared.

I was confused and traumatised, but my sanity had returned.

But doctors at the hospital didn’t recognise that the pills had caused my mental state.

I was diagnosed with psychotic depression and prescribed more, different psychiatric drugs – triggering a year in which further medication treated symptoms that the medication itself was causing,

By the end I was on seven different drugs, barely functioning: I recovered in September 2013 only after being admitted to another hospital and taken off all medication.

I haven’t taken any psychiatric medication or experienced another psychotic episode since.

That experience led me to spend years investigating the relationship between psychiatric drugs, psychosis, suicide and homicide, eventually resulting in my book, The Pill That Steals Lives.

I interviewed experts and people with lived experiences and came to believe the distance between what happened to me and the tragedies I was investigating was terrifyingly small.

It was a matter of luck that I didn’t kill my children, myself, or both, that night in September 2012.

We must be clear on this: psychiatric drugs can be lifesaving for some patients. But it’s also important to recognise that for a minority (approximately one in 100), they can be dangerous.

Professor Peter Gotzsche, Director of the Institute for Scientific Freedom in Copenhagen, has spent 20 years investigating the safety of psychiatric drugs.

‘One of the best guarded secrets in psychiatry is that antidepressants increase the risk of violence, including suicide and homicide,’ he told me.

This was the conclusion of a 2016 systematic review of 130 trials of ten different anti-depressants, all involving healthy adult volunteers with no signs of mental illness, and published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine by Professor Gotzsche.

They found that the drugs ‘double the occurrence of events in adult healthy volunteers than can lead to suicide and violence’.

Researchers calculated that for every 16 healthy people given an antidepressant, one additional person would experience one of these harmful effects.

Because the trials were placebo-controlled and involved healthy volunteers, ‘you cannot explain what happened by saying it was caused by depression or an underlying psychiatric illness’, said Professor Gøtzsche.

Concerns about antidepressants and extreme behaviour date back decades.

Professor David Healy, a psychiatrist who has spent decades researching antidepressants’ adverse effects, says: ‘These drugs can produce states in which people with no history of mental illness do things that are completely out of character.’

Professor Healy gave an expert evidence in the case of another mother whose story has extraordinary echoes of Lindsay’s.

In March 1999, Marilyn Lemak, a 41-year-old former nurse from Illinois with no history of violence, killed her children Nicholas, seven, Emily, six, and Thomas, three, in their family home. She drugged them before suffocating them, then tried to take her own life.

Like Lindsay, Marilyn had been regarded as a loving, devoted mother. But as her marriage disintegrated, she began to struggle and was prescribed the SSRI antidepressant sertraline. Over nine months, her dose was progressively increased from 50mg to 200mg a day, but her mental state deteriorated, and she was then prescribed the tranquilliser lorazepam.

Prosecutors portrayed Marilyn as a woman driven by revenge against a husband who had left her for another relationship; her lawyers argued she was mentally ill and should be found not guilty by reason of insanity.

However, the jury found her guilty: in 2001 she was convicted of murdering all three children and sentenced to life without parole.

Andy Vickery, a Texas lawyer specialising in pharmaceutical litigation, has since taken up her case, arguing Marilyn did not get a fair trial because the toxicity of the drug she was on was not considered as involuntary intoxication by prescribed medication and not considered a defence according to Illinois law at the time.

That changed years later, after an Illinois Supreme Court ruling in another sertraline-related murder case.

Today, Marilyn remains in prison, while her legal team is mounting a clemency petition arguing that she has already served 25 years and that the role of sertraline in her mental state should finally be considered.

Professor Healy says antidepressants can produce catastrophic behavioural changes through mechanisms including akathisia, emotional blunting and drug-induced delirium.

The possibility that antidepressants can produce profound behavioural changes is acknowledged on the drugs’ own labelling.

The current UK patient leaflet for sertraline (the first antidepressant prescribed to Lindsay), lists suicidal thoughts, psychotic disorder, hallucinations, aggression and paranoia as uncommon side-effects; affecting up to one in 100 people.

Other commonly prescribed antidepressants carry similar warnings.

As Lindsay became increasingly unwell, she herself reported troubling changes she believed were linked to the medication, repeatedly telling prescribers the drugs made her feel ‘spacey’, numb, like a zombie, and that she felt disconnected from her body.

Jurors heard that in December 2022 – a little over a month before the death of her children – Lindsay wrote in a note on her phone: ‘I was the healthiest, happiest mom. 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.’

Her husband Patrick, too, was convinced the medication wasn’t helping.

At a December 6 appointment, he told the psychiatric nurse practitioner that his wife was ‘10,000 times worse’ since starting medication and asked whether they could stop everything and ‘start from scratch’.

Even after the unimaginable horror of losing his children, Patrick publicly issued a statement asking for everyone to forgive Lindsay – ‘as I have’ and describing the ‘real Lindsay’ as ‘generously loving and caring’.

At the specialist perinatal programme at Women & Infants Hospital, Rhode Island, on December 20, 2022, clinicians also believed her symptoms were ‘more pharmacologically induced than purely depressive’, and were concerned she’d been overmedicated.

She was advised off the antipsychotic quetiapine, taken at 400mg and finally stopped on January 3, 2023. Her condition then worsened, with suicidal thoughts and thoughts of harming the children.

But quetiapine’s prescribing information warns of a ‘discontinuation syndrome,’ while the Royal College of Psychiatrists warns that stopping antidepressants can cause anxiety, insomnia, agitation and even suicidal thoughts.

The prosecution has argued that the drugs could not have contributed given that Lindsay had relatively low levels at the time of the killings.

So could months of starting, stopping and switching doses and withdrawal have played a part?

In the final weeks before the killings, she was taking the sedating antidepressant trazodone and the benzodiazepine lorazepam.

Her psychiatrist recorded ‘rebound anxiety’ as the lorazepam wore off, and switched her to the longer-acting benzodiazepine diazepam – with the intention of tapering that, too.

Meanwhile, amitriptyline, another antidepressant, was introduced at 10mg and then doubled to 20mg the day before the killings.

If the idea that a prescription drug could contribute to a loving mother killing her children seems far-fetched, I understand. Fourteen years ago, I would have thought the same.

After my own experience, I founded Antidepressant Risks CIC, to support people harmed by psychiatric drugs and bereaved families.

I regularly hear stories that never make the papers: sudden suicidality after starting a drug, intrusive thoughts of harming a child, a loved one transformed by starting, stopping or changing medication.

Most don’t end with someone dead: someone recognises the danger, a drug is stopped, the crisis passes.

I was one of those near-misses.

I will never know what would have happened had circumstances been slightly different that night.

What I do know is that the woman who stabbed herself and talked calmly of a suicide pact with God was not the woman I had been, nor the one I became again once the drugs left my system.

Whatever the jury decides about Lindsay Clancy’s state of mind, there is a question I hope does not disappear once the courtroom empties: what role did the succession of drugs she was prescribed, stopped and switched in those four months play in this tragedy?

After everything I’ve learned, I believe it’s one we have to ask.

Katinka Blackford Newman is founder of Antidepressant Risks CIC; antidepressantrisks.org

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