monstrous ovenbird I have tried again and again to write about Lindsay Clancy and have struggled endlessly to articulate my complicated thoughts. I generally avoid the news these days, but this case slipped through and it has been sitting in my chest, attaching itself to memories and traumas, accruing weight like a tumour. She killed her three young children then tried to kill herself. She is now paralyzed from the waist down. This is a fact. She is on trial to decide whether she is criminally responsible or whether she is not guilty due to being in the midst of a postpartum psychosis at the time. This is it. This is the worst case scenario when it comes to postpartum mental health outcomes. It is what I spend my working life trying to prevent. It is what I might have been. This is where I freeze. It could have been me. I look at that woman who is in one of the worst imaginable hells. I read her journal entries where she expressed that her mind didn’t feel like her own, where she outlined the relentlessness of intrusive thoughts and suicidal ideation. I see that she reached out for help again and again. She called crisis lines. She went to the hospital. She saw psychiatrists. She took her medication and it made things worse. She suffered from insomnia that wouldn’t respond to treatment. Then a voice told her to kill her children and she did. Now she has to live. They can put her in jail but what good would it do? She can’t possibly suffer more than she is already suffering. And it could have been me. It could have been me with my severe postpartum insomnia, with my anxiety so thick I could barely breathe, with my endless intrusive thoughts, and my wish to disappear. It could have been me, with my belief that I was in touch with a source of divine knowledge, with my cries for help that went ignored by my doctor, with my sense that I would never be myself again. I am talking to so many mothers shaken to the core by this case. Not because they can’t imagine ever being in Lindsay Clancy’s shoes, but because they CAN. Because they know what it is to fall apart, they know that psychosis didn’t feel so far away on all those sleepless nights with a baby screaming in their arms. They know the cold dread of loving their children with all that they are while still wanting to die, while still wanting an escape, any escape, from the impossibility of being the mothers they hoped they would be. They have experienced, first hand, the failure of the medical system to respond to their distress. When I went to my family doctor, three months postpartum, suicidal and unable to sleep and tormented by extreme intrusive thoughts, she told me to have another baby so I wouldn’t have time to be anxious. I sunk deep into shame. I thought I was just a bad mom. I thought I was overreacting. I didn’t reach out for help again for a year. And it took me three years to feel like myself again. Lindsay Clancy isn’t some monster that represents the antithesis to the “good mother.” Those of us who are here and parenting our children see that she isn’t so different from us at all. Her thoughts were my thoughts. Her suffering was my suffering. I was lucky and finally got the help I needed. She didn’t. And now the prosecution is trying to prove that she didn’t try hard enough to get help, that she wasn’t honest with her care providers, that she did this horrible thing consciously and intentionally and…my heart. My heart is breaking and I can hardly bear to watch because what I see is what I might have been, if things had gone just a little differently. Lindsay Clancy isn’t terrifying because we can’t ever imagine doing what she did. She’s terrifying because we can. Maternal mental health needs to be taken far more seriously. We need a concrete strategy for screening and for consistent care. Postpartum psychosis is a treatable medical emergency. After everything she went through she now has to take the stand to be told that all of this is her fault. And I know, in a small way, what that feels like—to believe that I am a “bad” mother and that my children deserve someone so much better than me, to believe it would have been better if I’d never been born. 260818 what's it to you? who go blather from