On the Lindsay Clancy case and what we're not saying about postpartum support

I'm not a doctor or a mental health expert. I am a mother, though, who has been in the trenches with her one and only child. I still can't even begin to imagine what Lindsay, the mother of those three children, went through for months before she finally broke and did the unspeakable.

Here's what really breaks my heart – she wasn't isolated. She had a friend of nearly thirty years she was texting days before, a nanny who called her a loving mother. She had a mother of her own, close enough that Lindsay said she was one of the reasons she didn't want to hurt herself. She was a labour and delivery nurse. She was inside the system and cared for, and she still fell through the cracks! Her journal entries were read out in court, and they've haunted me since… It wasn't cryptic – it was written in plain words. She was completely overwhelmed, three children deep, and, in her own words, "drowning". She wrote about her fear of going back to work, brain fog, money worries, and how disconnected she felt from her children and her husband.

Any mother reading that list will agree that none of that is unusual. And that is the problem! It was all there in clear words, and none of it raised an alarm because we have collectively decided that it's just the cost of motherhood – overwhelm, sleep deprivation, guilt, brain fog, money stress.

I want to come back to that list later, because I don’t think it lands the same way on every mother. Some of us are trying to figure out a second thing at the same time - not just whether what we’re feeling is normal, but what it might cost us to say it out loud.

What worries me also is how everybody is now talking about more awareness, how she was under- or over-medicated and so on, and we keep reaching for the standard arguments – more awareness, more or less medication, more clinical intervention – but is that really the whole answer? If a woman who worked in maternity care, who had people checking in on her, who was under psychiatric treatment, could still end up here, then the problem maybe isn't just medication. Could it be that we've built a system that knows how to treat a diagnosis and has almost no idea how to hold a person?

I really want to take a stand here and say that yes, medication matters, and I'd never tell a woman in crisis to put down her prescription and pick up a community circle instead. But she was on 13 different psychiatric medications, and no single provider saw the full picture of how fast she was deteriorating. It was also reported that her husband went to a doctor a week before the killings and said the medications were "turning her into a zombie". She even told her husband that she was having thoughts of harming the children and herself. Twice.

Under one of the many videos discussing the Clancy case, a woman described her own postpartum psychosis in stark terms – voices, hallucinations, being completely and utterly not herself. She said she survived it because she had both support and medical intervention, not one or the other but both, and she called it a treatable illness that too many women are left to face virtually alone.

The whole point, I think, is not medication instead of community, or community instead of medication. It's that we've built an entire postpartum mental health conversation around medication, and almost none of it around the people standing next to her while she takes the medication.

I participated in a research study last year — a mother at a UK university doing her own PhD on postpartum mental health, interviewing women who had lived through postpartum depression and psychosis. When I read the summary of the completed research a few months after the interview, I saw that many of the mothers described their professional knowledge, their closeness to the healthcare system, as a double-edged sword. One woman, who worked in mental health herself, said that her own insight "hindered" her, and she knew exactly what support was meant to look like, and she didn't want it, because knowing the system from the inside made her afraid of what disclosure might cost her. Another described carefully watching what she said to her own care team, because she knew how coercive the process could feel once you were inside it.

So being close to care didn't make these women feel safer. It made some of them more careful about what they revealed. I remember thinking this in my early days when the health visitor came home to check in on me – don't share too much about how you're actually feeling, because they may think you're incapable of looking after the child! Don't want social services involved! Keep your business to yourself, otherwise your kids get taken off you! 

That thought was even louder for someone like me. I was born in India, and I gave birth here in the United Kingdom. There’s a slightly different internal script when a health professional is sitting in her living room with a form on their lap. I’m not just thinking, “Am I doing this right?” I’m also thinking - whose version of right am I being measured against? What happens to me if I fall short of it? 

Take sleep, for example, I couldn’t listen to Lindsay’s sleep training journal entry without going back to my own attempt at it with my son, who still sleeps next to me. I couldn’t even stand the crying for a few minutes, so my heart aches for somebody who had to go through it for an hour. Sleep training, in my view, is cruel and goes against every natural maternal instinct to protect and keep my infant safe.

But that isn’t a neutral position to hold here. Where I come from, a baby sleeping next to his mother isn’t a decision anyone would think to have a view about. It’s just where babies sleep. Here it’s in a leaflet, a box on a form, a few raised eyebrows, and something I have to decide whether to declare or not. 

No health visitors have been unkind to me. But a mother who is worried that what she says may change the future of her child is going to give an answer that keeps her child in the house; she's not going to hand you the truth. 

Despite not being born here, that fear is something I must have internalised – must have heard somewhere before I even became a mother – that being honest about struggling is dangerous, and that silence is what keeps a family together and safe.

For a while I assumed that was just my own suspicion, but it really isn’t. There is a body of UK research on precisely this. Black and South Asian women in the UK access community perinatal health services less than White British women do, despite similar or higher levels of distress, and are more likely to be admitted involuntarily. When researchers interviewed Black and South Asian mothers who hadn’t accessed those services and asked them why, one of the barriers that came back was fear of the child being removed. Not embarrassment or shortage of awareness. FEAR. 

And the stakes are not abstract. MBRRACE - UK’s most recent figures show that suicide is still the leading cause of maternal death in the country in the window between six weeks and a year after birth, with psychiatric causes accounting for a third of the deaths in that period. In the year after a baby arrives, suicide is one of the likeliest ways for a mother here to die.

I don't think this part is getting enough attention in mainstream media. Stigma doesn't just live in a woman's head, and it's not simply that she's too embarrassed to ask for help. Maybe it's that she has good reason not to trust what happens if she does ask for help. And even when she does reach out – even when she has a friend, a nanny, a mother, a whole medical team – none of it is a guarantee, because none of those people were ever taught what to actually look for underneath "I'm ok, just tired".

I'd like to also point out that support doesn't even need to be clinical to matter. Sometimes it could just be someone else carrying the load for an afternoon. In the above case, it came out in court that her husband could still see friends, still play golf, still leave the house, all while she never got that same time away, never had a break from the children, never had anyone to hand the weight to. We talk about postpartum support like it has to come from a diagnosis from a professional.

Sometimes it's simpler and closer to home than that – sometimes it's just someone else staying up at 2 am so you're not the only one who does.

So where does that leave us?

I think it leaves us with a harder, less comfortable answer than "get her on medication". It leaves us needing community that isn't just warm – community that's trained to hold the nuanced and complex experiences of postpartum mothers. People around new mothers who know that a woman insisting she's coping can be the loudest warning sign there is. Spaces where a woman doesn't have to perform wellbeing to be believed, and where reaching out for support doesn't feel like handing someone a reason to take her children away.

That's the real work, I think – not just noticing mothers, but building the kind of brave and safe space that actually catches them before they fall.

My unqualified self doesn't have a neat ending or a solution for this very nuanced issue of maternal mental health support. But I know which side of the fence I'm standing on. A pill can quiet a mind, but it cannot teach a room full of people how to see a mother who is drowning in plain sight. Only human beings – other mothers, family, friends, community, society – can do that.

Sources: 

1. MBRACE-UK, Maternal mortality data brief 2022-2024, National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit, University of Oxford, January 2026 https://www.npeu.ox.ac.uk/mbrrace-uk/data-brief/maternal-mortality-2022-2024 

2. Jankovic et al., on differential access to community perinatal mental health services and rates of involuntary admission by ethnicity, UK.

3. Qualitative study of barriers to accessing perinatal mental health services among women of Black and South Asian backgrounds, BJPsych Open (interviews conducted 2020–21). https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-bulletin/article/barriers-to-accessing-perinatal-mental-health-services-and-suggestions-for-improvement-qualitative-study-of-women-of-black-and-south-asian-backgrounds/9177A0CFA7BC24FF973F2EAE201A4D63