In a culture that cares about protecting the powerless, who is more powerless than very young children? To some, the answer is a mother who killed hers.
The murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, a woman who killed her three young children, has set off nationwide discussions not just about postpartum psychosis, but about the suffering of mothers more broadly, and “how the mental health system treats women.” Clancy has become a cause célèbre.
At a rally of hundreds outside the Massachusetts courthouse where Clancy is on trial, a 52-year-old paralegal from Providence, Rhode Island told a reporter that “women are being dismissed, neglected and ignored.” On X (formerly Twitter), Republican pundit Tiffany Smiley tweeted, “Our healthcare system has failed women.” One of dozens of letters of support in court documents came from a coworker of Clancy’s, a nurse who wrote, “I could have been Lindsay. Anyone of us could have been.”
Really?
The defense argues that when Clancy killed her children, she had bipolar disorder with postpartum psychosis. On the night of the murders, they maintain, she experienced “command hallucinations” and “a delusion of influence.” As forensic psychiatrist Phillip Resnick explained, this means she not only heard a voice telling her what to do, she felt that her body had been “taken over by an external force… almost like she was a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings.”
Unlike postpartum depression, which is a mood disorder that by some estimates affects about one in seven women, postpartum psychosis is an extremely rare psychiatric emergency thought to occur in roughly one to two women out of a thousand. Even fewer experience both command hallucinations and delusions of influence. And filicide is exceptionally uncommon. According to one study, 4.5% of women with postpartum psychosis kill their children.
Yet somehow, Clancy has become “everywoman.”
“Motherhood will invariably introduce us to the less familiar, deeper strata of our humanity,” writes Jungian analyst Lisa Marchiano in her book, Motherhood, “where we are capable of the most destructive and reprehensible of acts.” Although the vast majority of mothers never harm their children, she writes, “most of us will admit in our more honest moments that we can at least imagine having those feelings, if only momentarily.”
Psychologist Doug Novotny points to 20th-century British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s theory of the “good enough mother,” whose imperfections are necessary for children’s psychological growth. The existence of ugly and even frightening maternal feelings is entirely consistent with being a good enough mother. (Acting on them, however, is not.)
In contrast, cognitive-behavioral psychologist Nando Pelusi thinks solidarity with Clancy looks like what he calls coalition signaling. “Saying, ‘that could have been me’ is not really saying ‘I might have done this,’ but more, ‘I’m on her side against the system that failed her.’”
Perhaps this is how Clancy is transformed from the agent in the story into merely a victim. The true agent, the villain, is the healthcare system; the mental health system; Big Pharma; the patriarchy… In a culture that blames individuals’ difficulties and failures on “systemic” issues rather than individual choices, it is natural to assume that a woman who was so broken as to kill her own children must first have been victimized.
Whatever the reason that women see themselves in Lindsay Clancy, the likelihood that new mothers who suffer from sleep deprivation, isolation, or even postpartum depression actually understand the state of mind in which a mother strangles her own children is vanishingly low. They do, however, understand what it means to suffer. That focus may generate a kind of boundary-blurring empathy that produces their sense of identification with Clancy.
Ironically, this may be what Clancy’s supporters genuinely have in common with her. According to the prosecution’s theory, Clancy’s plan was what forensic psychologist Kirk Heilbrun called “suicide combined with altruistic filicide.” She wanted to die but did not want her children to suffer without her, so she killed them believing they would always be together. In this view, Clancy’s own inability to imagine her children as psychologically separate from her helped produce her catastrophic conclusion that since she was determined to die, they would prefer to die, too.
Her supporters are not doing anything remotely comparable. But in collapsing the distance between themselves and Clancy, they make a related conceptual mistake: They substitute what they have felt or what they can imagine feeling for what she actually felt.
No matter which side is right about why, Lindsay Clancy is alive without her children — and she killed them. That must be a source of tremendous suffering for her. By all accounts, she was “a very loving mother who cared about her children,” as one of her children’s teachers described her. According to her mother-in-law, “She was very nurturing, very loving. She was a wonderful mother. Wonderful.” No witness has testified otherwise.
The jury is now deliberating. If convicted of first-degree murder, Clancy, who is permanently paralyzed from the waist down, will spend the rest of her life in prison with no possibility of parole. If convicted of murder in the second degree, the sentence is the same but parole is possible. If the jury returns a verdict of manslaughter, she will face up to 20 years in prison with the possibility of parole. And if she is found not guilty by reason of insanity, she will be committed to a secure state mental health facility — indefinitely, with release uncertain, and only under strict conditions.
None of those verdicts requires withholding compassion. Suffering and agency are not mutually exclusive. And agency need not preclude compassion. Neither does compassion require seeing Clancy as the victim in this story.
The victims were Cora (5), Dawson (3), and Callan (8 months).
You covered this with more nuance than I've read elsewhere. Thank you.
There seems to be two basic groups. The "err on the side of mercy" group wants to believe that people are basically good but sometimes come under the influence of forces outside of their control that break them. The "cast the first stone" group wants to believe we maintain complete personal agency no matter what factors are involved. Both beliefs may just be comforting human illusions. Whichever belief we adopt seems to depend upon our own brand of self-righteousness, existential insecurity, and/or current echo chamber.
So many people are ready with their verdict. But I don't envy the actual jury. What a difficult decision to have to make.
I'm a lifelong feminist and left-leaning liberal; women and women's issues have always been central to my life. I, like most women, am appalled by Lindsay Clancy's killing of her children and weep for the loss of their young lives. In the discussions of postpartum psychosis (and I note most scholars weighing in here were men), there is seldom historical data presented. In fiction as in Morrison's Beloved, the harrowing story of an enslaved woman who killed her daughter so she would not fall into the hands of enslavers, we understand the mother's reasons, even as we recoil in horror at the act. I am not familiar with historical examples of mothers killing their children, although it must have happened. In recent cases of women committing this nightmare of a crime, we read conflicting diagnoses: usually mental disorders, separate from or caused by hormonal/ biological changes. However, the social aspects fascinate me bringing me more questions.
The intense pronatalism in our culture, the focus on the expected expert, continual self-denying caretaking by women (as usual, the responsibilities of father figures are ignored) seems to me to create a state of motherhood that is quite simply unattainable. Why are women alone supposed to live up the self-sacrificing ideal? Even if they seek help, they are made to seem aberrant for not just getting on with their twenty-four-hour caretaking. Furthermore, some women who have experienced postpartum depression, even psychosis, after the first pregnancy, are expected to snap out of it. Sometimes, unbelievably, they choose to become pregnant and repeat the process despite the dismal first go round. Have women become complicit in accepting this dubious and dangerous version of motherhood? Who is colluding in it? Who benefits from their misery? I'd like to see more women reject this idealized version of womanhood and rebel. I chose not to bear a child and never regretted that decision, but my heart goes out to women who, for whatever reasons, became pregnant and found themselves desolate and alone. Not all of these women commit murder, and I don't feel qualified to weigh in on this case. But isn't it time to reevaluate our expectations of all women who become mothers?