The trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother accused of strangling her three young children before attempting to take her own life, has become the latest obsession of a vast online community of women who have consumed so much true crime that they no longer seem capable of encountering a horrifying story without searching for the secret truth underneath it. To these TikTok detectives, Clancy is another puzzle to be solved by women who have trained themselves to believe that every murder contains a conspiracy, every husband is potentially hiding something, and every apparent fact might be the clue that blows the whole thing open.

Across the internet, women are coming out of the woodwork to share "their truths" about what happened in the Clancy house that tragic day in 2023. Actress Lisa Rinna is the most famous example, boldly announcing online that she and her therapist had cracked the case: Patrick Clancy had murdered his own children and framed his wife. Never mind that Lindsay Clancy's own defense does not contest that she killed them; her attorneys argue that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and was therefore not criminally responsible for her actions.

The effect of true crime on women's psyches goes well beyond seeing conspiracies everywhere; the rot has seeped far deeper. The favorite pastime of millions of American women has become listening as someone recounts, often in graphic detail, the rape, murder, and abuse of real people. It is naive to believe that consuming a steady barrage of brutality as entertainment would not eventually shape both how women see the world and how they respond to the suffering of the people in it. True crime is not simply a mindless distraction; it transforms the worst moments of real families' lives into serialized entertainment, complete with heroes, villains, plot twists, and fan theories. The danger is not merely that it poisons the mind; it also poisons the soul.

Clancy is hardly the only woman to find herself at the center of the internet's web of women solving imagined conspiracies. Strangely, despite having killed her three children, she has been lionized in comparison with Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk, who has been ruthlessly harassed for months since her husband's execution while speaking at an event at a Utah college. That inversion should itself be a warning that the true-crime mobs have lost their moral bearings: the mother who killed her three young children becomes the heroine, while the young mother who buried her husband after his brutal murder becomes the villain.

Clancy's supporters have raised close to a million dollars in crowdfunding efforts for her family, while hundreds of messages have poured in from women describing the empathy they feel for her because of their own postpartum struggles. There is no question that postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis, and even ordinary postpartum hormonal fluctuations can be extraordinarily difficult to navigate, including for women with considerable support, which, by all accounts, Clancy had. Patrick took three months of paternity leave, supported his wife taking five months herself, and later insisted on working from home, while the family also paid for daycare and a nanny. He made time for Lindsay to exercise, took over formula feedings, and actively participated in her repeated attempts to seek psychiatric care.

But something revealing about the community that has rallied around Clancy is this: The same female internet culture that consumes murder as entertainment has also made therapy, psychiatric diagnoses, and psychiatric medication ubiquitous subjects of casual conversation and even personal branding. Destigmatization morphed into something else: a culture in which taking powerful psychiatric medication is treated as casually as starting a new vitamin regimen.

When Clancy sought help, the answer she received again and again was medication: a succession of psychiatric drugs prescribed, adjusted, stopped, and replaced as her condition deteriorated. Clancy herself, despite being a labor-and-delivery nurse with a history of SSRI use, appears to have accepted this pharmaceutical carousel with little resistance, while her family placed enormous trust in the doctors directing it.

Clancy moved through a bewildering succession of medications and providers, with drugs started, stopped, and changed as her symptoms evolved. Whatever the jury ultimately decides about her criminal responsibility, that pharmaceutical churn deserves scrutiny in its own right.

For years we have worried about young men disappearing into the manosphere, marinating in algorithmically reinforced grievance until they become angry, alienated, and unmoored from reality. The same thing is happening to women. The content is different — true crime instead of Andrew Tate, therapy-speak instead of pickup artists, psychiatric diagnoses instead of bodybuilding — but the effect is the same: an online world that leads its inhabitants to trust the stories they tell one another more than the reality in front of them.

In the Clancy case, that reality is almost unbearably awful: Three small children are dead, and their mother killed them. Yet an entire corner of the female internet has become so desperate for a twist ending, and so practiced at locating victimhood in the adult woman at the center of every story, that it can barely bring itself to see the actual victims. They were Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy, and no amount of amateur sleuthing or TikTok psychoanalysis should make us forget them.

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Bethany Mandel (@bethanyshondark) is a homeschooling mother of six and a writer. She is the bestselling co-author, with Karol Markowicz, of "Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation."

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