Public commentary surrounding the Lindsay Clancy trial relies on a comforting fiction. Commentators, pundits, and advocates look at a mother who strangled her three children with exercise bands and immediately search for an external scapegoat. They point the finger at a fragmented healthcare system, over-prescribed psychiatric medications, and the terrifying shadow of postpartum psychosis.
This framing creates a tidy narrative. It allows us to view horrific acts of filicide as medical malfunctions rather than human choices.
The lazy consensus treats severe maternal mental illness as an absolute eraser of moral agency. The moment a court introduces terms like psychosis or major depressive disorder, public discourse shifts from evaluating actions to pitying the perpetrator. This is a dangerous intellectual retreat. It infantilizes women, absolves individuals of accountability, and distorts our understanding of mental illness.
Postpartum psychosis is a severe medical emergency. It involves profound sleep disruption, delusions, and a break from reality. But having a psychiatric condition does not automatically render someone a mindless automaton incapable of choice. Conflating deep despair, severe depression, and suicidal ideation with total cognitive obliteration insults the millions of women who experience profound postpartum distress without murdering their children.
The prosecution in the Clancy trial laid out a starkly different reality. They argued that the defendant faced an intense crisis, felt overwhelmed by her life, and made a calculated sequence of choices to eliminate what she perceived as her barriers to ending her own misery. Witnesses detailed how she managed a timeline, executed specific steps, and understood the physical mechanics of what she was doing.
Dueling psychiatric experts spent weeks arguing over whether she heard a command voice or retained an awareness of illegality. This courtroom theater misses the broader point. When we rush to attribute every catastrophic maternal action to a psychotic break, we abandon rigorous logic in favor of emotional self-preservation. We want to believe that a normal, high-functioning mother would never commit such an act unless her mind was entirely hijacked by an invisible illness.
That belief is a coping mechanism. It protects us from confronting a darker truth: human beings, under extreme stress, isolation, or the weight of unmet perfectionist expectations, sometimes make monstrous choices.
Accepting accountability does not mean ignoring the reality of mental health struggles. Postpartum depression and anxiety are real, debilitating, and demand aggressive medical intervention. Healthcare providers make mistakes, and the transition into motherhood breaks many people. But acknowledging systemic failures in medicine does not require erasing personal responsibility.
When society treats mental illness as a get-out-of-jail-free card for violence, it devalues psychiatric science. True medical advocacy demands precision, not blanket pardons. It requires us to distinguish between a mind experiencing clinical depression and a cognitive state that completely precludes the understanding of right and wrong.
We do public health no favors by pretending that severe psychological pain strips away every ounce of human agency. Stop hiding behind the easy narrative that mental illness makes monsters out of ordinary people against their will. People make choices, even inside the darkest chambers of human suffering.
