Is the much-publicized trial of Lindsay Clancy really about the deficiencies within our nation’s system of mental health and how they tragically failed one family, or is it, as a prosecutor said, about an entitled woman who no longer wanted the help she needed and killed her children “because she was done playing the game”? The answer to that question depends on your perspective. For weeks now, scores of women from across the country — as far away as Texas, Ohio and Virginia — have made the trek to a Plymouth, Massachusetts courthouse to see what a jury decides.

Three years ago, Clancy, a former labor-and-delivery nurse, strangled her three young children to death in their Boston-area home before swallowing prescription pills, slashing her wrists and neck and jumping headfirst out of a bedroom window. She survived, though now paralyzed from the waist down, and awaits a verdict on what’s to become of her life following what she and her lawyers say was a horrifying period of psychosis. 

In the period of time before the killings, Clancy had reached out for help again and again — visiting her psychiatrist 14 times, trying 13 different medications, calling a suicide crisis line, turning to the emergency room, attempting to enroll in an inpatient program and even telling her husband that she feared hurting their children.

Many of the women who traveled to the courthouse empathized with Clancy, recalling their own severe declines in mental health after giving birth, at times struggling to pinpoint what separated their outcomes from hers. “She could be any one of us,” retired teacher Dottie Kiley said. Allowing reporter Stephanie McCrummen to listen in for The Atlantic, she remembered wanting to end her life while on antidepressants. “I had suicidal thoughts, clear as a bell,” Kiley said. “So bad I called the police and told them, and they had a cop come down and sit with me. It was a small town, and they had time to do that.”

As the women stood in line for an hour or more to enter the courtroom, their stories continued. The exhaustion and anxiety Marta Quijano, another spectator, experienced while raising her firstborn were so great that she still looks back in astonishment. “I remember one time—she was a cranky baby—and I remember not so much shaking her but going like this,” Quijano said, demonstrating how she squeezed her daughter’s shoulders and screamed. “They are called intrusive thoughts because your brain says something, and you don’t recognize it.”

Ashlyn Rizzo, who’d attended the trial for two weeks straight at that point, recalled emptying her 401(k) to run away from her newborn. “I had delusions. I couldn’t tell wake from sleep. I didn’t confide to anyone. I wrote a note,” she said. Then, a psychiatrist got her into the same program in Rhode Island that had turned Clancy away one month before the killings. “Saved my life,” Rizzo said.

After weeks of testimony in the trial, the jury remains deadlocked on whether Clancy is criminally responsible for the deaths of her children or not guilty by reason of insanity. Depending on the specific verdict, one option will yield her life in prison without the possibility of parole; the other, commitment to a Massachusetts mental health facility.

“My God, what does she have to do?” defense attorney Kevin Reddington asked in his closing argument, after walking the jury back through Clancy’s medications, psychiatric visits and even a close look at her journal, with handwriting deteriorated into what he called “chicken scratch,” suggestive of extreme psychological distress. But, “this case is not about the mental health system,” Commonwealth prosecutor Jennifer Sprague countered, pointing out that Clancy — with her family, nanny, job and employer-sponsored health insurance — had more help than most people. 

The verdict is not yet in. The women in attendance, who traveled from far away to hear the trial, have left by now. Like Clancy’s husband, they will anxiously await the verdict from their homes, and an answer to this question: Since 1990, 37 out of 42 Massachusetts defendants who entered an insanity plea in a murder case have nonetheless been convicted. Will Lindsay Clancy continue that trend, or change it?