Mom News: Let's Talk About Lindsay Clancy

This past week on Instagram, I shared that several years ago, I was the first responder to take the call after a mother of two had killed her children and then herself. An incredibly violent event.

Then I got about 236 DMs asking me what I actually do. Because my professional title is therapist, but I’ve also written a book, and I talk a lot about workplace policies, and none of that quite explains what I was doing on that call.

So before we get to Lindsay Clancy, here’s the very truncated version of my Frankenstein therapy career.

2008–2010: Working retail while I was in grad school. (This is also where I met my podcast co-host Ruby Falk, so, worth it.)

2010–2012ish: Community mental health, working toward my clinical license, with adults experiencing severe and persistent mental illness.

2012–2016: Became clinically licensed, passed board exams. Worked in a psychiatric hospital, then clinical lead at a community crisis center, then hired onto an Addiction Medicine team at one of the top hospital systems in the country. This is where I think I learned what empathy actually feels like.

I sat with a mother of five who was dying from alcohol use — a woman who really never had a chance from the beginning — and it taught me that everyone deserves to be loved. Especially kids, because when you grow up surrounded by neglect, abuse, substance use, high-demand faith — that becomes the only system you know. And breaking free from a system you didn’t choose takes an enormous amount of foresight and resources that a lot of people simply don’t have access to.

Think about how small a child’s world is. A kid growing up in poverty doesn’t know there are other options. Maybe they catch glimpses of a different life, but systemic failure runs deep, and we forget that constantly.

I sat with a mom in the NICU while her baby died from substance exposure. That didn’t make my hurt for her go away. And it didn’t change the fact that her complex PTSD and total lack of support existed alongside addiction being a chronic, relapsing brain disease. I can hold the injustice of all of it and still care for her. Both things were true.

October 2017: I became a mom.

February 2018: Quit my full-time hospital job. Took a PRN role doing overnight behavioral health evaluations in the ER so I could spend my days with my baby. I saw a lot of psychosis — substance-induced and otherwise. Also trained with Postpartum Support International and launched my private practice.

August 2019: Took a job with Aetna doing management consulting on their Organizational Risk Management team — where I learned consulting, benefits, workplace crisis response, insurance, insurance vendors, all of it. That same October, I got pregnant with our daughter.

Everything gets blurry after that. Newborn, working from home during COVID, launching 4th Trimester Wellness on Instagram to support moms through it, quitting that job at some point, keeping my private practice going, doing parental leave benefits navigation for a company that’s since been acquired, and moving our family to my husband’s hometown suburb outside Kansas City.

By 2022, I had around 65,000 followers. Today it’s 200,000+ across platforms. I published my first book. And my actual day job now is providing on-site Critical Response & Consultation to workplaces after disruptive events — death of an employee, a mass shooting, a robbery, that category of thing.

In the past week alone, I responded to the death of a child to support hospital staff, and the death of an employee at a pharma company. I love this work. I don’t totally know how to explain that, except that crisis work is for certain people, and I’ve always been one of them. (Except for the time a man in withdrawal, lying on his floor with a swastika tattoo on his chest, asked me to grab his gun from under his bed before the cops showed up. That one wasn’t fun.)

I want to be honest about something else, too: I grew up with almost no friction. Happy, healthy parents. Cared for in every way. Encouraged to be brave, which I now understand is a tremendous privilege. A home with no substance use disorders, no poverty, no abuse. College, grad school, a straight line. It was only in my professional life that I met people who, in any other version of my life, I never would have.

Which brings me to Lindsay Clancy.

Lindsay Clancy’s case is everywhere right now, and it makes me so sad. Sad for her. Sad for the first responders. Sad for her family, her ex-husband, and for Cora, Dawson, and Callan — three kids whose lives ended far too soon. It’s just really damn sad.

That said, for me, this story doesn’t have a villain. I’ve taken a lot of heat for saying that, but the only “villain” I can identify is a system — one that either failed her, or didn’t work fast enough or well enough.

Postpartum Psychosis is a medical emergency. If that’s genuinely what she was experiencing, here’s what makes it uniquely dangerous: the person inside it is usually the last one to know it’s happening. That’s part of why trained providers matter so much, and why a family who knows the warning signs matters just as much. And you and I both know how easy it is to lie your way through a six-week postpartum mood questionnaire.

Her trial is underway right now, and testimony from someone close to her has described Lindsay mentioning exhaustion after her third baby — but never voices, never hallucinations. Sit with that for a second. If you were her, would you have brought that up to a friend? Because I don’t think I would have. I think I’d have been too scared, or too unaware that anything about my thinking had gone sideways, to say it out loud.

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Reporting has also described her as resistant to psychiatric medication — which, to be fair, describes a huge number of moms. One of the most common questions I get in therapy is about medication safety while breastfeeding. (The InfantRisk Center is an excellent resource if you’re navigating that.) But here’s what I can say with confidence: I have never worked with a mother who went through as many medication changes, in as short a window, as what’s been described in her case.

If it were me — after that many failed attempts, layered on top of sleep deprivation, multiple kids, and a job pulling at me — I think I’d hit a point where I stopped believing anything was going to work. Maybe that’s just me, but I got lucky: Zoloft worked for my postpartum anxiety, and it was the only medication I ever had to try.

Lindsay Clancy has pleaded not guilty. Her defense isn’t that she didn’t do it — she doesn’t dispute that. It’s that she wasn’t criminally responsible for it, because of the state her mind was in. That distinction matters, and it will be decided by a juror whether or not that stands.

So I won’t tell you what I think the verdict should be. I don’t think that’s actually the most important question here.

Here’s the one I keep coming back to instead: postpartum psychosis doesn’t announce itself. By definition, the person living through it is often the last person who can see it clearly. Which means the entire burden of catching it in time falls on everyone around her — a partner, a provider, a six-week check-up.

And most of us are walking around with almost no idea what any of that actually looks like. We know “baby blues.” We maybe know postpartum depression, if we’re lucky enough to have someone say the words out loud to us. But psychosis — the racing thoughts, the sleep that won’t come, the sense that something is wrong that you can’t name — most new parents have never heard a single sentence about it before it’s happening to them or someone they love.

That’s not an accident. That’s a public health system that has decided postpartum mental illness is a quiet, private, six-week-checkup-box kind of problem, instead of something we talk about as loudly and as early as we talk about car seats and sleep training. Every new parent gets a pamphlet about shaken baby syndrome. Almost none get a plain-language rundown of what a psychiatric emergency in a new mother can actually look like, or what to do in the first hour if you see it.

There will be a verdict in this case. A verdict won’t fix that gap. What would move the needle is treating postpartum psychosis education the way we treat any other emergency: taught before it’s needed, repeated until it’s boring, broadcast loudly enough that a partner, a friend, a nurse, anyone in the room knows exactly what they’re looking at and exactly what to do next. Quiet doesn’t save lives. Loud does.

If Perinatal Mood Disorders is an area you want to go deeper on, I wrote a whole chapter on postpartum mood disorders in The Myth of the Perfect Mom — what's normal, what's not, and what to actually do if you're worried about yourself or someone you love.

I’m sure we’ll return to this case in Mom News over time, but for now, make sure you’re taking care of yourself.

xo,

Erin