TRIGGER WARNING: This post discusses the deaths of children, postpartum mental illness, postpartum psychosis, intrusive thoughts and images involving harm to an infant, and maternal filicide.
The Lindsay Clancy trial has evoked extraordinarily strong reactions. People are certain, undecided, confused, horrified, curious, and sometimes all of those things at once. Some identify so strongly with Lindsay Clancy that they can imagine themselves in her. Others cannot comprehend how anyone could feel empathy for a mother who killed her three children.
The facts at the centre of the trial are devastating. Cora, Dawson and Callan Clancy died at the hands of their mother. What the jury is being asked to consider is Lindsay Clancy's mental state at the time and whether she was criminally responsible. Her defence argues that she was experiencing postpartum psychosis and severe psychiatric deterioration. The prosecution argues that she understood what she was doing and acted deliberately.
I've found myself thinking less about which side people choose and more about how they get there.
Understanding Is Not Agreement
As a therapist, part of my work involves holding another person's position, emotions and mental state in consideration, whether I agree with them or not.
I want to understand how someone arrived where they did.
What does this mean to you? What about this story affects you so strongly? What experiences, beliefs or fears inform the way you see it?
Even now, I can understand how someone could look at the murder of three children and experience almost unbearable moral outrage.
Matt Walsh has spoken about the Clancy case in explicitly moral terms, describing the murder of one's children as among the most evil and heinous acts a woman can commit and connecting the response to this case to what he sees as a broader collapse in society.
I strongly disagree with him.
As a psychologist working in perinatal mental health, I find the remarks narrow. I think they work to dismiss years of research, clinical evidence and women's lived experiences of reproductive mental health. They also overlook how dramatically the social structures surrounding motherhood have changed, including the loss of the proverbial village that once helped carry some of its weight.
Still, I try to understand how he gets there.
Maybe it comes from horror. Maybe he holds an unwavering belief that moral responsibility must remain attached to an act regardless of a person's mental state. Perhaps acknowledging the role of psychiatric illness feels too much like excusing violence. His understanding of justice, morality and social order may require a very clear line between his perceptions of good and evil. Maybe it’s click-bait content meant to provoke and antagonize.
I don't share that position, but I can understand how someone might arrive there.
The Mother We Expect
Recently, a friend, who gave me permission to share our conversation but will remain anonymous, told me that she saw Lindsay Clancy as the most terrible, selfish kind of woman.
That particular word caught my attention.
Woman
Why had she described what kind of woman Lindsay Clancy was, as opposed to what kind of person or human being she was?
So we got curious about it.
What does it mean when a woman commits an act that violates our expectations of womanhood itself?
What does it mean when a mother commits an act that violates our expectations of motherhood itself?
Women have been socialized differently across generations. The 1950s gave us the pure, family-oriented, selfless and often subservient woman. The decades that followed challenged and expanded that role. Women could have careers, independence and ambition, while somehow continuing to nurture, parent, manage a household and hold everyone together with notably less community and continued general lack of support for postpartum conditions.
Expectations have changed enormously.
Yet there remains an underpinning of what a woman, and certainly what a mother, should be.
The Madonna. And I don't mean the singer.
The mother who is pure, loving, innocent, selfless, devoted and protective. Sacred.
She resembles the ideal mother so many of our childhood selves wanted and, sometimes, the mother our childhood wounds still long for.
Of course we know mothers struggle. We know, like we know a concept… Einstein’s theory or relativity.
I'm less convinced that we expect to see what that struggle actually looks like.
The Mother We Don't Expect
We don't expect to see a mother standing in her kitchen with tears streaming down her face, looking at the cherubic faces of the children she loves, overwhelmed by fear or rage or numbness.
We’ve more recently come to expect her feeling the weight of the world bearing down on her as she realizes that she is responsible for protecting and guiding her children and turning them into productive, socially conscious, members of society. That’s the acceptable acceptance.
We are less prepared for a mother in her bed, drifting in and out of sleep, with frightening thoughts and images moving through her mind.
Accidents. Death. Violence. Something happening to her baby. Something happening to her.
Sometimes women experience intrusive thoughts in the context of postpartum anxiety, depression or obsessive-compulsive symptoms. A postpartum psychiatric emergency can also involve hallucinations, delusions, profound confusion or a loss of contact with reality.
These experiences are very different clinically. Intrusive thoughts do not indicate intent, and most mothers who experience frightening intrusive thoughts will never harm their babies. Psychosis is also not synonymous with violence.
We need to be able to talk about what happens in women's minds without making those women afraid to tell us.
When Harm Can Feel Like Protection
One of the more difficult things to understand about severe psychiatric illness is that a mother's experience of what she is doing can become profoundly distorted.
Sometimes a mother can believe she is saving her children.
Harm can feel protective. Death can be understood as rescue. An idea that seems incomprehensible from the outside can make sense to someone whose relationship with reality has changed.
Take that idea to Sunday coffee sometime and explore it dispassionately.
How might a human mind arrive there?
And what happens to our understanding of the word evil when it does?
For me, it becomes considerably more complicated.
Holding More Than One Truth
Another friend of mine comes to the Clancy case from almost the opposite direction. She is overcome with empathy for Lindsay. She sees the isolation of motherhood, inadequate support, the exhaustion and touched-out experience of having three young children, psychiatric suffering, a husband she believes failed to recognize the extent of his wife's distress, and the hormonal, biological and psychological changes of the postpartum period.
I understand how she gets there as well.
I also think our identification with someone's suffering can become so strong that we begin to lose sight of the people who were harmed.
Cora, Dawson and Callan cannot become collateral damage in a conversation about postpartum mental health.
Their deaths are the tragedy at the centre of this case.
At the same time, Lindsay Clancy's mental state matters.
We have to be capable of holding both of those realities.
When we are across from someone who doesn't share our view, I would hope for us to become more interested in how they arrived at theirs.
How does this affect you? Why does it affect you so much? What are you seeing that I might not be seeing?
Then we can explore, share, consider, expand our understanding and occasionally reorient ourselves.
We may still disagree when the conversation is over.
I've tried to do this while reading Matt Walsh's commentary, and it has been hard.
I disagree with him profoundly. I am on the Clancy side. I believe severe mental illness can fundamentally alter a person's relationship with reality, and I believe mental state matters when we consider criminal responsibility.
I can also get curious about what is happening for someone who would elevate himself as an authority on women's reproductive mental health, dismiss years of research and evidence, anecdotal and otherwise, disregard the changing social conditions in which women mother, and simply pick up a proverbial pitch-fork.
Maybe that was less dispassionate than I asked you to be.
For Me, it’s Personal, too.
Postpartum psychiatric illness existed in my family long before I had language for it.
When I was six weeks old, my own mother was diagnosed with postpartum psychosis. She became catatonic and spent approximately three months as an inpatient, receiving regular electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT.
She was fortunate. So was I.
My mother had already been seeing a psychiatrist weekly for years. He knew her well enough to recognize a change in her. He knew her baseline, saw that something was terribly wrong, and intervened.
I think about that sometimes.
There was already someone paying attention. My mother didn't have to convince a stranger that something was happening to her. Someone who knew her recognized that she had changed.
Then, a generation later, I became a mother.
When my daughter was six weeks old, I was overwhelmed with intrusive worry.
What if someone kidnapped her? What identifying characteristics would I remember to help find her?
Her big blue eyes. A little pink triangle-shaped birthmark in the middle of her back. The shape of her nails. Her thick dark hair.
What if something happened to me and she was left with someone terrible or selfish? What kind of world would she grow up in?
These were the kinds of thoughts going through my mind.
One night, I heard my name shouted from the hallway.
I sat straight up in bed and answered, "Yes?"
I was alone.
I felt foggy and confused. Everything seemed surreal.
As I lay there, I had intrusive thoughts about drowning my daughter. My mind supplied the details.
Lukewarm water. Not cold. Because I didn't want her to suffer the shock of cold water.
Then I thought about her soul going to heaven. But what would happen to her body?
Another thought came.
I could eat her.
And somehow, in that moment, this felt perfectly normal to consider.
She had come from my body. I could put her back into my body. She would be safe there.
I fell asleep.
The next day, I went to my doctor.
My daughter is an adult now.
I didn't kill my child, and I'm not on trial and so I can’t exactly equate my experience with Lindsay Clancy. But, I had the thoughts.
I don't consider myself an evil woman.Yet my postpartum mind produced thoughts and images that, stripped of their context and written on a page, sound horrifying.
I loved my daughter profoundly. I still do and she happens to think I am decidedly not evil and actually quite wonderful. Good Moms have Scary Thoughts.
I count my blessings that I had the support that I did and I am grateful for my experience. That experience changed the way I understand mothers in psychiatric distress.
The Reassuring Distance Between "Her" and "Me"
New mothers are not always rested.
They are not always safe.
They are not always supported.
They may be profoundly sleep-deprived, frightened, isolated, overwhelmed, under-supported, or struggling to recognize themselves in their own thoughts.
And sometimes, absolutely terrible situations emerge and we sit back and determine.. am I watching a mother like that or a mother like me.. a woman like that or a woman like me.. a person like that or a person like me. And we sometimes conclude: I could never be like that.
The distance between who we believe we are not & would never be and who we believe we are may be far more complicated than we would like to comprehend.
That distance itself may feel reassuring, because that distance allows us to locate the horror safely in someone fundamentally unlike ourselves.
When we are healthy, rested, supported, safe and firmly connected to reality, perhaps that distance allows us to occupy a position of outrage. We cannot imagine ourselves thinking it, feeling it or doing it. Calling the person who could do such a thing evil creates an explanation, and it keeps her safely separate from us.
Leave the Door Open
None of this tells a jury what verdict to reach in Lindsay Clancy's case, and none of it diminishes the lives of Cora, Dawson and Callan.
There are also important clinical distinctions here. Most women who experience intrusive thoughts are not psychotic and will never harm their children. Most women with postpartum mental illness do not harm their children. Understanding the psychiatric context of an act does not require us to minimize the harm that occurred.
What I hope we can do is hold more than one truth at the same time.
Children deserve protection. Mothers experiencing psychiatric emergencies deserve protection. Families deserve medical and mental health professionals who recognize when a woman is becoming seriously unwell.
And women need to be able to say the unspeakable thing out loud and be taken seriously before something terrible happens.
Because imagine being a new mother who has just had an image of hurting her baby.
Now imagine believing that if you tell anyone, they will look at you differently forever.
They will think you are dangerous.
They will think you are a terrible mother.
They may think you are evil.
How many women will choose silence?
Imagine you Do tell. You tell over and over. You are dismissed, ignored, left without adequate support, overmedicated, undermedicated, abused, neglected, etc.,
What happens to those women?
Whatever you believe about Lindsay Clancy, whatever verdict you hope the jury reaches, and however you understand criminal responsibility, I would ask you to leave the door open for curiousity, compassion, and care.
Leave it open for the exhausted mother, the mother frightened by her own thoughts, the mother who feels detached when she expected to feel blissful, and the mother who hears or sees something nobody else does.
Leave it open for the woman who is terrified that telling the truth about what is happening inside her mind will change how everyone sees her.
Suspend judgment long enough for her to speak.
Get curious enough to hear her.
Sometimes the safest thing we can do for a mother and her children is make it possible for her to tell us.
IMPORTANT
A Note About Seeking Support
If you are pregnant, postpartum, or experiencing concerning changes in your thoughts, mood, behaviour, sleep, or sense of reality, please reach out for support. Intrusive thoughts can occur during the perinatal period and do not, on their own, mean that a person wants to act on them. However, thoughts or experiences that feel frightening, confusing, increasingly intense, or difficult to manage deserve attention and care.
If you are experiencing thoughts of harming yourself or someone else, are hearing or seeing things others do not, are experiencing unusual or strongly held beliefs that others tell you are not based in reality, feel disconnected from reality, or you or someone close to you is concerned about your immediate safety or the safety of your baby or children, please seek urgent help.
In Canada, call or text 988 for the 9-8-8 Suicide Crisis Helpline, available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
If there is an immediate danger to you, your baby, your children, or another person, call 9-1-1 or go to your nearest emergency department.
You can also contact your physician, obstetrical or maternity-care provider, psychologist or other mental health professional, or access mental health and crisis services available in your local community.
This article is provided for education and discussion and is not intended to provide diagnosis, psychological treatment, medical advice, or crisis assessment. If something about your experience concerns you, you do not need to determine what diagnosis it might represent before asking for help.
This article was authored by Penelope Waller Ulmer, a verified therapist in our network. Learn more about their expertise and approach below.
About Stellocare
This insight comes from Stellocare, Canada’s trusted network of verified mental health professionals. Connect with our therapists today by asking our AI, browsing our list, or requesting a personal match from our social worker.
