“Another Lindsay Clancy” — What You’re Really Saying
Say “another Lindsay Clancy” out loud. Strip the true-crime vocabulary off it, and what you’re actually saying is “mother who went crazy and killed her kids.” That’s the entire contents of the comparison. No diagnosis, no detail, no name the speaker would recognize a week later.
Andrea Yates drowned her five children in 2001, and for two decades she was the name people reached for when a mother killed her children. Convicted in 2002, acquitted on retrial in 2006 after a jury heard what postpartum psychosis does to a brain. We had a national conversation about maternal mental health. Published the papers, formed the groups, said we understood. Then Clancy’s case arrived and we grabbed the same shorthand like we’d never heard any of it.
Nearly two-thirds of mothers who committed filicide had documented mental health histories. More than half were showing symptoms at the time — documented by someone who saw them, charted them, and didn’t intervene. Research found that roughly four in ten mothers with PPD acknowledged harmful thoughts toward their children. The women were talking. The profession’s own estimate of how many women were struggling fell short of reality.
Those three words do the same thing to these women that the system did. The hospital documented her and didn’t act. We read about her and didn’t think. The hospital got scrutinized. We got a heart emoji. Tony lays out what those three words actually cost — and why the comparison is the failure, not a description of it.
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This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.
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