I’m compelled to speak out about the Lindsay Clancy trial, both from a professional and a personal perspective.
I am the executive director of It Takes a Village, a nonprofit that provides free postpartum support to isolated families throughout western Massachusetts. Over the last 12 years I have worked with thousands of families, many struggling with Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorders (PMADs). I am also a mother. I experienced postpartum anxiety after my daughter was born, and four years later, severe postpartum depression after my son.
The first time I thought about harming my children, my son was six months old. I had been distraught for two days, clinging to him obsessively, terrified he could fall to his death if I slipped or he wiggled from my grasp. That day, I stood at the balcony of my second-floor hallway and wondered what it would feel like to drop him over the ledge. The scariest part, looking back, is that I didn’t immediately recognize the thought as abhorrent. The shame that followed taught me to hide it. What a horrible mother I was. I wouldn’t dare tell anyone.
Days later, exhausted after weeks with almost no sleep, I stared at my screaming toddler and wondered if slamming her into the wall would make her stop. This time, I knew instantly that something was very wrong.
I understand now that these “intrusive thoughts” are extremely common in the postpartum period and are often among the first signs of a PMAD: sudden, distressing, unwanted thoughts that can occur during pregnancy or anytime in the first year after birth. They can be triggered or worsened by hormonal shifts, sleep deprivation, life stress, a family history of mood disorders, birth complications, or a lack of support. Sometimes there is no clear cause.
At my son’s next well visit, the pediatrician handed me a postpartum screening. Are you feeling sad or miserable? Have you been anxious for no good reason? Are you so sad you can’t sleep? Yes. I checked “no” to every question, afraid I could lose my children if I told the truth. But the shame underneath that fear was enough to push me to get help anyway.
I was diagnosed with postpartum depression. I saw therapists, psychiatrists, specialists. Medication, then new medication, then more, then higher doses. I felt like a zombie. It took years to treat. It became almost a dark joke — I have postpartum depression, and my son is turning five. With hard work, the right medications, therapists who never gave up on me, and a village of support around me every day, I slowly stepped into recovery.
That is why it hurts so badly to watch people judge Lindsay Clancy from a place of certainty they haven’t earned — armchair verdicts built on black-and-white thinking, as though a mother in the grip of psychosis is making the same kind of choice the rest of us make on an ordinary day. And Patrick Clancy’s entire world fell apart that day, too. I’ve seen him publicly judged for what he “should have done,” as if love and vigilance are a match for a psychiatric emergency no one around her recognized in time.
If Lindsay Clancy is convicted and this is treated simply as a crime committed by a woman who “knew what she was doing,” I fear we will lose the conversation this country still desperately needs to have. Postpartum psychosis is a recognized, treatable psychiatric emergency but too few clinicians are trained to catch it, too few families know the warning signs, and too few insurers are willing to pay for the level of care that real recovery requires. I know firsthand how long and uneven that road can be, even for a case far less severe than psychosis. Insurers need to give this illness the weight and funding it deserves, so mothers have a real fighting chance at recovery before tragedy strikes — not just better sentencing guidelines.
We need research into how to prevent, recognize, and treat perinatal mental illness before it reaches a crisis point. We need a healthcare system that screens for it seriously, and pays for treating it seriously. We need a public willing to hold two truths at once: that children died, and that their mother was profoundly ill. Lindsay Clancy deserved more than she got. So does every mother struggling right now to hide what she’s thinking, afraid that telling the truth will cost her everything.
Lisa Goding is executive director of It Takes a Village in Huntington.