Lindsay Clancy was prescribed at least six psychiatric medications by multiple doctors before she strangled her three young children — and the establishment press would rather debate postpartum psychosis than ask why a mother was loaded up on a chemical cocktail that made her worse, not better.

Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, were killed on Jan. 24, 2023, at the family's Massachusetts home. Their mother had been under psychiatric care for four months. She had checked herself into a psychiatric hospital. She was discharged. Nineteen days later, the children were dead.

Here is what Clancy was taking, according to testimony reported by the New York Post: Zoloft, an SSRI antidepressant; Ativan, a benzodiazepine for anxiety; Lorazepam, the generic form of Ativan — prescribed alongside it; Zolpidem, the sleeping drug Ambien; Diazepam, another benzodiazepine better known as Valium; and Trazodone, yet another antidepressant. Multiple drugs in the same class, stacked on top of each other, prescribed by what her own defense called "a handful of different doctors."

Her husband Patrick testified that despite all these pills, she "kept getting worse and worse." He struggled to recall which drug was which when the prosecutor walked through the list. "I wasn't keeping track of the number of pills taken out of each bottle," he said.

NBC News framed its coverage around postpartum psychosis, asking in its headline whether that condition "drove" Clancy to kill. AP News did the same. Both outlets detailed the defense's argument — that Clancy suffered from a rare mental illness linked to hormonal changes and sleep deprivation — while burying the pharmaceutical regimen that preceded the killings.

The prosecutor, Shanan Buckingham, pushed back: "This was not a woman in the throes of psychosis. This is not a public debate about women's mental health and how the medical system treats women. This case is about this defendant, Lindsay Clancy."

But Buckingham is wrong on one count. This absolutely should be a debate about how the medical system treats women — and men, and children. A medical system that stacks SSRIs, benzodiazepines, and sedatives in a single patient, prescribed by doctors who apparently weren't coordinating with one another, and then expresses shock when the patient deteriorates, is a system that refuses to examine itself.

Clancy's defense lawyer, Kevin Reddington, said she heard voices telling her, "This is your last chance. Kill the children so you can kill yourself." The FDA has required black-box warnings on SSRIs for years because of documented risks of suicidal ideation and violent behavior, particularly in young adults and particularly when dosages are changed. The interaction effects of stacking multiple SSRIs with multiple benzodiazepines and a sedative-hypnotic are not well studied — because nobody in the pharmaceutical industry wants to fund that research.

If convicted, Clancy faces life without parole. If found not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility, she would be committed to a state mental health facility. Either way, three children are dead. And the cocktail of drugs that preceded their deaths gets a passing mention while the industry that manufactured, marketed, and profited from those drugs faces no scrutiny at all.

The question nobody in the courtroom or the press corps wants to ask: How many Americans are sitting on that same cocktail right now?