Lindsay Clancy and the Thoughts We Don't Say Out Loud

I don't think I'm alone in not being able to look away from the Lindsay Clancy case — the Duxbury, Massachusetts mom currently on trial for killing her three children. The defense argues she was in the grip of severe postpartum psychosis after being prescribed over a dozen(!) psychiatric medications in four months. The prosecution calls the murders "premeditated." It's truly heart-shattering, to put it mildly.

I'm usually an open book about my path to parenthood, but this is one part I don't talk about enough. When I was about eight weeks postpartum with my twins, after a long fertility journey to get there, I developed postpartum anxiety and OCD. I had intrusive thoughts about driving with my kids in the car, convinced I might suddenly swerve into oncoming traffic, and at one point, I was terrified of being alone with them.

At the time, I couldn't tell if these were feelings I wanted to act on (because why else would my brain be handing them to me), or if they were just thoughts my mind refused to let go of. My therapist helped me draw the line between a thought and an impulse, and my kids' pediatrician encouraged me to go on medication. Lindsay Clancy, despite quite literally begging for help, wasn't so lucky — and the system failed her for it.

Almost nobody outside perinatal psychiatry seems to know that somewhere between 70-100% of new moms report unwanted, intrusive thoughts about their baby being harmed. Most of us never say it out loud, and most of us are never in danger of acting on it. But anyone who's stood in those terrifying shoes, psychosis or not, knows she likely had zero intention of hurting those kids.

Guilty or not, she's already living through the sentence the rest of us got spared: needing help and not getting it soon enough.