The Lindsay Clancy trial exposes how stigma, medical sexism and a fractured maternal mental healthcare system can leave new mothers in crisis without the support they desperately need.

Content statement: This piece includes discussions of murder, infant death and child abuse, postpartum depression and psychosis, and sanism. 

News of Lindsay Clancy’s triple-murder trial is flooding the Internet, and with it, conversations about postpartum depression. In January 2023, Lindsay Clancy killed her 5-year-old, 3-year-old and 8-month-old children before attempting suicide, which left her paralyzed from the waist down. The facts of their deaths are not up for debate in this Plymouth trial, but whether or not the severe postpartum psychosis, clinical depression and bipolar disorder Clancy was experiencing meant she was criminally insane. 

Prosecutors argue Clancy intentionally planned to kill her children by sending her husband on errands and point to her taking her children to the doctor that morning as evidence of her healthy frame of mind. But Clancy’s mother-in-law explained Clancy was “begging for help” right before she killed her children. In December, just weeks before, she told her mother and then-husband Patrick (the couple are now divorced) that “she had thoughts of harming the children.” 

The case has laid bare the failures of a U.S. mental healthcare system that did not protect Clancy or her children, and still leaves countless new mothers without adequate care.

Postpartum depression (PPD) is a mood disorder that affects more than one in eight women who give birth. Up to half of these cases go undiagnosed because women are afraid of sharing their feelings or asking for help. This is rooted in medical sexism: the reality that when women share their symptoms, they are often dismissed and medical conditions go misdiagnosed or undiagnosed. Black women are up to three times more likely to experience PPD compared to white mothers because of disparities in prenatal, natal and postnatal care and community stigma and fear surrounding mental illness and healthcare professionals. At the same time, moms who share their experiences with self harm, suicidal ideations and intrusive thoughts risk having their children taken away from them (a reality disabled mothers face disproportionately) making women hesitant to share with medical professionals and their larger support systems. 

Postpartum psychosis (PPP) is much rarer, affecting about one in 1,000 women after childbirth, including rapid mood changes, hallucinations, delusions, paranoia and severe insomnia. The vast majority of women experiencing PPP get direct medical intervention because of the severity of the symptoms. 

Early on New Year’s Day 2023, 19 days before the killings, Lindsay Clancy voluntarily admitted herself to McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, but was discharged after five days with outpatient follow-up plans. 

McLean also occupies a remarkable place in American cultural history. Sylvia Plath was treated there in 1953 following a suicide attempt, and her hospitalization helped shape the psychiatric-hospital sections of The Bell Jar. Decades later, Susanna Kaysen spent nearly two years at McLean beginning in 1967 and based her memoir Girl, Interrupted on that experience; its 1999 film adaptation, starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie, depicts the hospital (though those scenes were filmed at Harrisburg State Hospital in Pennsylvania).

Modern psychiatric institutions like McLean remain severely underfunded, understaffed and overcrowded, pushing patients toward discharge. When patients are in in-patient care, they are often stripped of basic rights, dignity and personal privacy: from being forced to wear paper clothes that rip, to policed communication and involuntary confinement. As psychiatric institutions close or discharge people without care plans in place, many individuals with mental illness enter the unhoused community or the prison system because they are not able to access the help they need. 

This past May, HHS Secretary announced a new federal initiative of curbing the prescription of psychiatric medications, specifically SSRI, pushing alternatives and further stigmatizing receiving medical treatment for mental illness. While Trump’s administration is increasingly pushing pronatalism, Trump has not taken any substantive steps to address postpartum depression—even though his daughter Ivanka has spoken openly about experiencing postpartum depression after the birth of her three children. 

Unsurprisingly, women’s healthcare, especially women’s mental healthcare, is historically underresearched, leaving mood disorders like PPD and psychiatric emergency conditions like PPP misunderstood. The healthcare system consistently fails to recognize how social expectations and pressures surrounding motherhood contribute to this, and the lack of systemic support for mothers and parents (i.e. the lack of paid family and medical leave, affordable childcare, and flexible work schedules) force the system to over-rely on women. This naturally leads women to burnout. 

At least part of the reason women don’t receive proper medical care is the persistent “perfect mother” myth in which social and popular media depicts motherhood as purely joyful, so when mothers experience exhaustion, anxiety, depression and thoughts of self or infant harm, they believe they are the only ones. 

Even when postpartum depression is discussed, far right influencers like Matt Walsh describe PPD as a result of “selfishness.”  As ex-evangelical writer Elena Baker wrote, Walsh is regurgitating tradwife rhetoric which teaches that women are inherently and biologically submissive, and that their only path to salvation and to happiness is through motherhood. Thus any failings as a mother are the fault of the woman, not the spouse nor the system around her. 

While Clancy stands trial, people are mourning the loss of Hayden Panettiere, a child star who had long struggled with postpartum depression following the 2014 birth of her daughter, Kaya, and experienced domestic violence from her ex-boyfriend Brian Hickerson. This week, news outlets revisited Panettiere’s allegation that Neutrogena (one of her long-time partners) attempted to end her contract after she spoke honestly about her postpartum depression. She said on Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast this May that the skincare brand discussed terminating her contract on grounds that she violated their “morals clause,” after she shared how much she related to her character on Nashville’s own postpartum depression. 

Longtime supporters of Panettiere, who died this month after a long-time struggle with addiction exacerbated by PPD, and mental health advocates are calling people to boycott Neutrogena. Neutrogena released a statement Thursday on Instagram where it accepted responsibility and accountability “that we made her feel unsupported during a very difficult time,” and announced the corporation would be investing in organizations and programs that support women experiencing PPD. 

What Clancy’s case and Panettiere’s allegations about losing a contract for sharing her experiences with PPD illustrate, is the profound failings of both American society and the U.S. healthcare system to care for and support women with PPD and PPP. Today, new mothers have the deck stacked against them in more ways than on—facing shame surrounding maternal mental healthcare and pressure from the Christian patriarchy to reinforce a view of idyllic motherhood that any mother knows, doesn’t exist. 

For help with postpartum mood disorders, text or call 1-833-TLC-MAMA for the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline of 1-800-944-4773 for Postpartum Support International. If you or someone you know needs help, text or call the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988. 

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