There is a point at which empathy stops being a virtue and becomes an intellectual liability. Gad Saad, the Canadian evolutionary psychologist who coined the term “suicidal empathy,” describes a form of empathy so excessive or misdirected that it overrides reason, consequences, and even the interests of the very people we are supposed to protect. I think the Lindsay Clancy case is an uncomfortable illustration of that problem. Empathy is useful when it helps us understand why a human being arrived at a terrible place. It becomes dangerous when understanding is treated as an obligation to suspend judgment. We can acknowledge postpartum mental illness, bipolar disorder, a possible psychotic episode, failures in psychiatric care, and an obviously complicated personal history without pretending that those considerations erase the fundamental moral question before the court. Compassion and accountability are not mutually exclusive concepts. In fact, a functioning moral framework requires both.
Clancy is currently on trial in Massachusetts for the deaths of her three children, and as of August 27, 2026, the jury has not reached a verdict. Her defense argues that she was experiencing postpartum psychosis and therefore was not criminally responsible. The prosecution argues that she understood what she was doing and that the killings were deliberate. The psychiatric question is therefore not some peripheral detail; it is the center of the legal dispute. But that is precisely why the testimony of forensic psychologist Kirk Heilbrun on August 25 deserves attention. Heilbrun testified that the alleged command hallucination appeared only during the approximately 18 minutes in which the killings occurred and that she did not report experiencing it before or afterward. He described that pattern as extremely unusual and questioned whether the account represented acute psychosis at all. He went further, suggesting that the psychosis explanation could provide a convenient way of reducing culpability. That does not prove that Clancy fabricated anything. It does, however, mean that skepticism is not cruelty. It is part of the examination of evidence.
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What I find more disturbing, however, is what has happened outside the courtroom. Hundreds of supporters, many of them women wearing pink and carrying messages such as “Believe,” “She Needed Help,” and “Peace For Lindsay,” gathered outside the courthouse to demonstrate their support. I understand the impulse. I understand the fear of maternal mental illness being ignored. I understand the desire to expose failures in healthcare. I can even understand feeling compassion for a woman who may genuinely have been profoundly ill. What I cannot understand is allowing that compassion to dictate the conclusion before the evidence has been evaluated. The court is not deciding whether Lindsay Clancy was a good mother, whether her husband was a good husband, whether the American healthcare system failed her, or whether women deserve better psychiatric care. Those are separate questions. The court is determining criminal responsibility for the deaths of three children. Dragging every surrounding grievance into that question does not make the argument more humane. It makes it less intellectually honest.
This is where “suicidal empathy” becomes more than a provocative phrase. The problem is not empathy itself; the problem is the moment when empathy becomes a mechanism for selecting which facts are permitted to matter. Once we emotionally identify with one side, every inconvenient fact begins to look like cruelty, misogyny, victim-blaming, institutional conspiracy, or some other convenient explanation for why the evidence should not count. That is how sectarian thinking works: first we choose the moral tribe, then we construct the interpretation. And it can happen to conservatives, liberals, feminists, religious people, atheists, activists, institutions, entire political movements. Intelligence is not merely the capacity to solve problems. Sometimes intelligence means being willing to discover that the evidence contradicts the story you desperately wanted to be true. If my ideological instinct tells me to defend someone and the evidence tells me otherwise, intellectual integrity requires me to follow the evidence.
Perhaps the most uncomfortable conclusion is also the simplest: we are allowed to feel empathy without surrendering our judgment to it. Clancy may have suffered from serious mental illness. She may have experienced psychosis. The healthcare system may have failed her. Her husband may or may not have been an imperfect partner. All of those propositions can be investigated independently. None requires us to dilute the moral gravity of what happened to three innocent children. And if the evidence ultimately establishes that she was legally incapable of understanding the nature or wrongfulness of her actions, the law has mechanisms for recognizing that reality. But until then, turning a criminal trial into an exercise in emotional identification is not compassion. It is the abandonment of judgment disguised as compassion. The moment empathy becomes powerful enough to make us defend anything, question everything except our preferred narrative, and regard skepticism itself as immoral, empathy has ceased to be humane. It has become intellectually suicidal.
