The tweet froze me in place. Three children were dead, allegedly killed by their mother in the minutes it took the father to run two quick errands. I watched my toddler happily play in the backyard as I refreshed my feed for more information until mounting anxiety made me put my phone down. Lindsay Clancy’s smiling family photos were all I could think about. One of her sons was a little older than my daughter; they could’ve been in the same class.
Three years later, Clancy is currently on trial for first-degree murder. Her lawyers are arguing that she repeatedly sought mental health help in the months leading up to the murders but received inadequate care and was prescribed too many medications. The prosecution says the killings were premeditated. Clancy’s ex-husband claims the medical system failed her in a myriad of ways. He filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against her providers earlier this year.
Clancy, who is young and white, lived in an affluent Massachusetts neighborhood at the time of the deaths. She was a dedicated nurse who doted on her kids, according to the people around her. It’s a stunning contrast to the horrific picture painted in court documents. The frenzied media coverage isn’t surprising, given the shocking details of the case. But I saw a piece of myself in Clancy’s story for a different reason.
A few days after I gave birth to my daughter, I had an epiphany: My husband was dangerous. The man I’d loved for nine years had eagerly doted on our baby girl since I gave birth. Now, I realized it was a ruse. I told him that I no longer trusted him, bracing for his anger. Instead, he met me with gentle worry. I hadn’t slept in days because I felt too wired to lie down. My mood was unpredictable, and I’d become extremely irritable. Something was clearly off, and the sharp pivot toward paranoia was a troubling turn. My husband asked my mother to help watch the baby. No one knew what was happening, but he discerned that I shouldn’t be alone with my daughter. He called my psychiatrist’s cell phone and filled her in. She told him that I might need crisis services if I worsened.
The next day, I started to hear clear messages from heaven. I sat up in bed and said I needed to rewrite the Bible. Once the revelations started coming, it was impossible to keep track of them. My family members wanted to kill my daughter. I was the most famous person in the world. I shouted out the prophecies as they came to me before grabbing a notebook to record it all. I couldn’t stop talking, even though I had a feeling no one was really understanding me. My husband took me to a suburban emergency room recommended by my psychiatrist, and doctors transferred me to the hospital’s psychiatric unit.
My medical records show that my providers worked constantly to find a solution and introduced medications in the hopes I’d improve. When I kept insisting that I was a special messenger, they went back to the drawing board and tried again. The answer came in a mix of drugs, including a high dose of antipsychotics that broke the delusions and left me stable enough to be released nearly three weeks after I arrived. Parts of the hospital stay are hazy, but I can recall other moments vividly. I had a persistent belief during the hospitalization that my daughter was a figment of my imagination. When we reunited, I felt emotional if I looked at her for too long. The mental break turned my life upside down, but she was real. That gave me the motivation I needed to focus on getting better.
Postpartum psychosis occurs in one to two women per one thousand births—and I was one of them. It affects thousands of American women every year, some of whom have no prior psychiatric diagnosis. It’s easy to condemn those involved in high-profile psychosis tragedies—Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children in 2001, comes to mind—but it’s a view that lacks nuance. Someone who has postpartum psychosis has lost touch with reality; in rare cases, women harm their children in a deluded effort to protect them. Clancy later said that she’d heard a voice telling her to kill the children, then herself. She jumped out of a second-story window the day of the deaths, which left her paralyzed from the waist down.
Whether Clancy was experiencing psychosis when she killed her children is being debated in court, but the evidence shows that she repeatedly sought mental-health treatment in the months beforehand. After I arrived at the hospital, they admitted me under an involuntary hold, which means I couldn’t choose to leave. When it became clear something was seriously wrong, everyone involved in my care jumped into action. A psychiatrist examined me every day. Staff members diligently documented my condition, monitoring my mood, sleep, and diet around the clock. When it was time to go home, I hugged the doctor who delivered the news.
The episode is so far removed from my current life that I sometimes forget it happened. But reminders sneak up on me, and I’m thrown back to the small hospital room I called home as a roving prophet. I was separated from my newborn for a good portion of her first month, which nearly destroyed me upon my recovery. It felt like I’d flunked the most important exam of my life on the first question. As I wrestled with feeling like a failed mother, I struggled to think about what could’ve happened if my husband hadn’t rushed me to the hospital. On the ward, I screamed at other patients and told the nurses I’d kill them, all because I thought God was asking me to. My gruesome hallucinations felt so real that they’re still disturbing to me years later.
But I have a happy ending. My treatment brought me back to myself, and the medication stopped my erratic behavior. The worst part of my episode, other than being separated from my baby, was how I embarrassed myself in the days leading up to my diagnosis. But things could’ve ended tragically. Postpartum psychosis is associated with an elevated risk of infanticide; some reviews have estimated that as many as 4% of affected mothers may kill their infant.
Sometimes, my mind wanders to a question that feels inconceivable. What would’ve happened if I’d been left unsupervised with my baby? I reflect on the intensity of my delusions and recoil at how I would’ve responded if my thoughts spiraled. I was convinced my daughter was divine and fiercely believed people wanted to harm her. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture a scenario where I might’ve believed she was no longer safe on earth. The experience has made it impossible for me to dismiss women who commit unthinkable crimes as purely evil. The same voices have whispered to me. I was just fortunate enough to escape them.