{"id":753121,"date":"2026-08-29T02:28:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-29T02:28:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/753121\/"},"modified":"2026-08-29T02:28:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T02:28:11","slug":"the-trouble-with-i-could-have-been-lindsay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/753121\/","title":{"rendered":"The Trouble With \u201cI Could Have Been Lindsay\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

The murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, a woman who killed her three young children, has set off nationwide discussions not just about postpartum psychosis<\/a>, but about the suffering of mothers more broadly and how the mental health system treats women. For some, Clancy has become a cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre.<\/p>\n

At a <\/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 \u201cwomen are being dismissed, neglected and ignored.\u201d On X (formerly Twitter<\/a>), Republican pundit Tiffany \ud83d\ude00 tweeted, \u201cOur healthcare system has failed women.\u201d One of dozens of letters of support in court documents came from a coworker of Clancy\u2019s, a nurse who wrote, \u201cI could have been Lindsay. Anyone of us could have been.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is this really true?<\/p>\n

The defense argues that when Clancy killed her children, she had bipolar disorder<\/a> with postpartum psychosis. On the night of the murders, they maintain, she experienced \u201ccommand hallucinations\u201d and \u201ca delusion of influence.\u201d 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 \u201ctaken over by an external force\u2026 almost like she was a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike postpartum depression<\/a>, which is a mood disorder<\/a> that by some estimates affects about one in seven women, postpartum psychosis is an extremely rare psychiatric<\/a> 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 percent of women with postpartum psychosis kill their children. <\/p>\n

It’s perhaps strange, then, that Clancy has become a kind of everywoman.<\/p>\n

\u201cMotherhood will invariably introduce us to the less familiar, deeper strata of our humanity,\u201d writes Jungian analyst Lisa Marchiano in her book, Motherhood, \u201cwhere we are capable of the most destructive and reprehensible of acts.\u201d Although the vast majority of mothers never harm their children, she writes, \u201cmost of us will admit in our more honest moments that we can at least imagine having those feelings, if only momentarily.\u201d<\/p>\n

Psychologist Doug Novotny points to 20th-century British psychoanalyst<\/a> D.W. Winnicott\u2019s theory of the \u201cgood enough mother,\u201d whose imperfections are necessary for children\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n

In contrast, cognitive-behavioral<\/a> psychologist Nando Pelusi suggests that solidarity with Clancy looks like what he calls coalition signaling. \u201cSaying, \u2018that could have been me\u2019 is not really saying \u2018I might have done this,\u2019 but more, \u2018I\u2019m on her side against the system that failed her.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps this is how Clancy is transformed from the agent in the story into merely a victim in the eyes of many observers. The true agent, the villain, is the healthcare system; the mental health system; Big Pharma; the patriarchy. There is an assumption, generally coming from a place of empathy, that a woman who was so broken as to kill her own children must first have been victimized.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>-blurring empathy that produces their sense of identification with Clancy.<\/p>\n

Ironically, this may be what some of Clancy\u2019s supporters genuinely have in common with her. According to the prosecution\u2019s theory, Clancy\u2019s plan was what forensic psychologist<\/a> Kirk Heilbrun called \u201csuicide<\/a> combined with altruistic<\/a> filicide.\u201d 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201ca very loving mother who cared about her children,\u201d as one of her children\u2019s teachers described her. According to her mother-in-law, \u201cShe was very nurturing, very loving. She was a wonderful mother. Wonderful.\u201d No witness has testified otherwise. <\/p>\n

Postpartum Psychosis Essential Reads<\/p>\n

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\u2014indefinitely, with release uncertain, and only under strict conditions. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

The victims were Cora (5), Dawson (3), and Callan (8 months).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, a woman who killed her three young children, has set off nationwide…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":753122,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-753121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=753121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/753121\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/753122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=753121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=753121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=753121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}