I’ve gone back and forth for days about whether to write this.
The Lindsay Clancy case is heartbreaking, and I mean that with my whole chest. Three children are dead. A mother is facing the consequences of what happened. And everywhere I look online, people are talking about postpartum mental illness in a way that’s made me genuinely uncomfortable to sit with.
Not because I doubt postpartum mental illness is real — I’ve lived it. I know what it feels like to be in that particular kind of exhausted state of mind. The kind where you’re barely holding yourself together while trying to keep a baby alive, and you don’t even recognize the person staring back at you in the mirror. That’s not me claiming to know what was happening in Lindsay Clancy’s mind. I don’t. I’m not qualified to say whether she was experiencing postpartum psychosis or what her legal responsibility should be. That’s not my call.
Somewhere in our rush to show compassion to a struggling mother, I think we’re letting a line blur. Compassion doesn’t require us to stop calling something horrific. And recognizing that someone was severely mentally ill doesn’t mean we have to stop grieving the people who were hurt.
Postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis are not the same thing
This distinction keeps getting lost, and it matters. Postpartum depression can be devastating on its own — it can hollow out how a mother thinks, feels, functions, connects with her baby, and it can make ordinary days feel unbearable. I’m not minimizing that for a second. But postpartum psychosis is a different thing entirely: rare, severe, a genuine psychiatric emergency, with hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, a real break from reality. It’s not just “really bad depression.”
I bring this up because I don’t want a mother somewhere reading about this case, deep in her own postpartum depression, to think this could be me. And I don’t want us to quietly start treating violence against a child as some expected extension of postpartum depression. It isn’t, and we need to be able to say so without minimizing how serious this illness can get.
Mothers need real help — people who listen when something feels wrong, doctors who take them seriously, spouse, family and friends who know the warning signs and aren’t afraid to act on them. And sometimes what a mother needs is immediate psychiatric care. Full stop.
I know what it’s like to need help
I can only speak for myself here. When I was struggling with postpartum depression, I knew something wasn’t right, and I knew I needed help. I was in an abusive relationship at the time, running on fumes, emotionally wrung out. I know what it’s like to be in a very low place. But my experience wasn’t postpartum psychosis, and I’m not going to pretend to know what was happening inside Lindsay’s mind.
I also don’t want to overlook something important about her story: she did seek treatment. She saw providers, took medication, sought additional care. So this isn’t a story where I get to say “I struggled too, but I asked for help and she didn’t” — that’s not what happened, and I think sitting with that honestly is what makes this conversation harder, but also more truthful.
My own experience doesn’t give me the ability to explain what happened to her. What it does give me is this: please don’t let struggling mothers walk away from this believing that postpartum depression makes them secretly dangerous. And please don’t make mothers afraid to say the quiet part out loud — something isn’t right. We need mothers to be able to say I am not okay and have people actually listen when they do.
What about responsibility?
Here’s where the conversation gets uncomfortable for me. There’s an idea floating around online that if we dig up enough suffering behind someone’s actions, we’re somehow obligated to stop talking about responsibility altogether. I don’t buy that. A person can be deeply suffering, seriously mentally ill, desperately in need of compassion and treatment — and what happened can still be horrific. Those things can all be true at once.
I don’t know what the legal outcome of this case will be, and that’s not my place to decide. But I do know three children died, and remembering that doesn’t make me cruel. Those kids deserve to be more than a footnote in their mother’s story. They were people, with personalities, with people who loved them, and their deaths shouldn’t disappear into a conversation that’s entirely about the adult who survived.
When does empathy tip into identification?
This is the part I keep circling back to. I’ve seen women online say some version of “I understand her,” and I get the impulse — motherhood creates this strange, powerful sense of recognition between women. When someone says she was overwhelmed, terrified, barely hanging on after having a baby, something in us goes, yes, I know that feeling. That empathy is real, and it can be beautiful.
But I think there’s a real difference between saying “I understand what it feels like to struggle as a mother” and saying “I understand what happened to her.” Those aren’t the same sentence, even if they start to sound like it online. I can have postpartum depression and feel deep compassion for a woman going through psychosis without pretending our experiences are the same. I can understand desperation without understanding violence. I can recognize suffering without attaching myself to every action someone took while suffering.
That distinction matters to me because when we start telling mothers “that could have been you,” I worry we’re planting fear instead of encouraging them to reach out. I don’t want any mother walking away from this case believing her postpartum depression means she’s secretly capable of something terrible. I want her walking away thinking: if something doesn’t feel right, tell someone.
We shouldn’t be afraid of the hard conversation
Motherhood makes us want to protect each other from uncomfortable truths. We want to tell the exhausted mother she’s doing enough, that she’s not alone, that it’s going to be okay — and she does need to hear that. But she also needs to hear: please get help when you need it. There’s no prize for suffering in silence, no virtue in pretending you’re fine when you’re not, nothing weak about needing professional help. If a mother is having frightening thoughts, hallucinations, paranoia, or feels disconnected from reality, that’s not something to white-knuckle through until bedtime — that needs to be taken seriously, immediately.
We shouldn’t shame mothers for needing help. But we shouldn’t romanticize the suffering itself, either.
The mother matters too
Something else gets lost when these conversations happen. When we focus entirely on whether mothers are dangerous, we forget that the overwhelming majority of mothers with postpartum depression are simply hurting. They need compassion, practical help — someone to drop off dinner, hold the baby while she showers, sit beside her and say “you don’t have to pretend you’re okay with me.” Sometimes they need a doctor or a therapist. Sometimes medication. Sometimes more intensive care than that. There should be room for all of it, and I wish we talked about maternal mental health as a normal part of caring for mothers, not something we only take seriously after it’s already gone horribly wrong.
I don’t want mothers afraid of their own minds
Maybe that’s really what’s been bothering me this whole time. I don’t want a mother in the thick of postpartum depression to start wondering if she’s secretly dangerous. I don’t want women afraid to admit they’re struggling. And I don’t want a culture where every hard maternal experience gets either brushed off or treated as a potential explanation for something horrific.
There’s a middle ground here, and it isn’t complicated: postpartum mental illness is real, postpartum psychosis is serious, mothers deserve help, families need to know the warning signs, children deserve protection, and victims deserve to be remembered. Mental illness doesn’t automatically answer every question of responsibility. None of that has to cancel out the rest.
If you’re a mother reading this
If you’ve been struggling, please don’t wait until you’re completely unraveled to say something. Tell your husband, your mother, your friend, your doctor, your priest — anyone you trust. And if the people around you aren’t taking you seriously, keep asking until someone does. You don’t have to prove you’re suffering enough to deserve help. You don’t have to wait for a crisis. You’re not a bad mother for needing support. Honestly, asking for help might be one of the most responsible things you ever do.
I don’t know what was really happening inside Lindsay Clancy’s mind. I don’t know what mix of illness, medication, and circumstance led to that day. But I know three children died, and I know a mother was suffering, and I don’t believe acknowledging one requires erasing the other.
I can grieve those children with my whole heart and still hold compassion for a mother who was suffering. I can believe mothers deserve far better mental health care without believing every terrible act should be excused by illness. I can believe in mercy without giving up on truth.
We don’t have to choose between compassion and accountability. We can care for mothers, protect children, and tell the truth about what happened — all at the same time.