Closing arguments began on Thursday 27 August in the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother who killed her three children before trying to end her own life. Clancy does not dispute that she killed them, but says she did so in a fit of psychosis after a long struggle with her postpartum mental health, including untreated bipolar disorder.
Her trial has turned into a social media spectacle, exposing many ugly realities about American life: the psychological precariousness of so many overextended and support-deprived mothers; the palpable disregard or even disdain for motherhood from so many fathers; and the perverse and malign impulse among so many not just to empathise or opine on a horrible tragedy, but to exploit it for the thrill of a little electronic heart. The sheer number of people online who have developed a parasocial relationship with the people involved in this tragedy – or those who have manipulated it to fit a particular political mould – has been chilling to observe.
The Clancy case has captured headlines because a mother murdering her children is so antithetical to our ideas of maternity it is nearly unthinkable. And while it is actually not so uncommon for mothers to murder their children (especially in America), it is a specific kind of crime, one that radically differs from most other murders in terms of motivation. Mothers who kill their children are rarely driven by financial gain, or involved in an interpersonal dispute or altercation with their victim, or part of a criminal gang, or overtaken with jealousy. The typical pattern involves a woman who is young, socioeconomically disadvantaged and single – often a scared woman with an unwanted pregnancy who kills her newborn. A triple murder of a five-year-old, a toddler and a baby is the kind of crime more often carried out by fathers: more than 90 per cent of family annihilators are men. And those men tend to kill not because they are in the throes of a psychotic break, but because they are simply overrun by emotion: angry their wife is leaving them, perhaps, or humiliated over their own financial ruin.
That is not Clancy’s story. Her lawyers point to years of escalating psychological distress, for which Clancy repeatedly sought care. She called suicide hotlines. She tried, twice, to be admitted into an inpatient programme for mothers and their babies. She checked herself into a psychiatric hospital. She saw one psychiatrist and then another. She was not diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which her lawyers say she has, but she was prescribed a rotating cocktail of medications, which her lawyers say helped to torpedo her into psychosis. She was screaming out in every way she could that she was in crisis – and instead of getting help, she was in a suburban house, mostly alone, caring for the infinite needs of three small children.
Now, mothers everywhere are talking about Lindsay Clancy, in public and in private. We are talking about how we, too, have experienced the reality-altering tsunami of postpartum hormones, brain-bending sleeplessness, and chest-clenching anxieties that come with early childrearing. I do not personally identify with Lindsay Clancy, and the specifics of the case make me feel ill. But I also know what it feels like to sit sobbing in a hospital bed, intellectually understanding that I was experiencing a huge hormonal drop, but also feeling to my very marrow that I could not do what was being asked of me, that I was going to fail the tiny being placed in my arms and for whom I felt such an overwhelming urge to protect. I had never before felt such profound and all-encompassing despair, never felt such intensity of emotion that it simply blacked out all rational thought, made me feel feral and divorced from my own mind. Those feelings, thankfully, went away quickly. But the pulling-back of that curtain – of seeing just how fragile my own tether to reality could become – changed and chastened me, and made me see women like Clancy quite differently.
There are no shortage of social media posts and media columns by women who read about Clancy and think, there by the grace of God go I – women who also suffered from postpartum psychosis, who also felt their tethers fray, who also begged for help and were ignored or refused. That this case has unleashed such an avalanche of personal stories, and of female rage and despair, is important: so many women feel they, like Clancy, have been crying out for help, and the unbearable cost of being ignored has now been exposed.
But in our bizarre reality of algorithmic social media, this collective cry for help has sometimes morphed into unhealthy psychological projection – mothers online who don’t just relate to Clancy’s past-the-breaking-point desperation or have empathy for her mental illness, but who seem to identify with and justify the whole of her actions. These women online have attempted erase her crimes and the horrors her children and husband experienced in order to turn her into something of a maternal mascot for their own pain. Scores of women have shown up at her trial, clad in pink. Some trial-watchers have gone down conspiracy rabbit holes, simultaneously speaking out about the ways in which motherhood can be emotionally overwhelming and psychologically distending, while also arguing that Clancy didn’t do it at all. Instead, they have pointed to her husband, Patrick (everyone, from the police to defence lawyers to Lindsay Clancy herself, has made it clear that Lindsay Clancy was the killer, and the question of her trial is not whether she did it but whether she is responsible for her actions). But for many of the women who are the most empathetic to Clancy’s plight, the ghastliness of her actions seems so difficult to comprehend that they have invented a different story.
But the problems with the online conversation don’t end there. Postpartum psychosis is poorly understood, but it is rare. The kind of postpartum psychosis that leads to the murder of children is rarer still. It is a dynamic that is distinct from the slew of much more common postpartum struggles, including depression. There is a danger in collapsing the space between even crippling depression and a psychosis that separates one’s mind from reality. There are many dangers in suggesting that every mother who is overwhelmed or battling mental illness is simply one bad moment away from filicide, not the least of which is the stigma that could follow if “struggling mom” is conflated with “mom who kills her kids”. A mother who worries others might believe her to be murderous is a mother who may be less likely to seek the help she needs.
Yet as troubling as some women’s parasocial relationships with Clancy can be, arguably worse are the cruel and misogynist responses. One TikTok poster went viral for sharing a video of her crying and holding her baby with the line “same, Lindsay” superimposed over it, a strange and disturbing choice that seemed equal parts narcissistic and performative, but hardly a felony offence. But it fuelled a whole round of social media mania, this time led largely by conservative men insisting that the women who so much as empathise with Clancy are themselves dangerously mentally ill, unfit mothers, or perhaps just evil. One prominent conservative added that postpartum depression doesn’t even exist, and that women who claim to have it are just selfish. These men did not seem particularly interested in why so many women might feel for Clancy. They did see an opportunity to trash a favourite target – white liberal women – and to reassert their worldview that good women want nothing more than motherhood, and would feel nothing but eternally grateful for it.
What is the point of all of this?
The outpouring of maternal grief and love has felt useful, the kind of collective female truth-telling that also fuelled the early days of the Me Too movement. But as that truth has been refracted through our phone screens, the medium – algorithmic social media – has distorted it into something else entirely. Less pent-up outpouring, more attention-seeking public performance. Some of those performances are themselves cries for help. But some seem to be acts of delusional self-flattery: I am smarter than the police and prosecutors, and I can see things that others cannot. The most malign are simply knowingly saying outrageous and offensive things because that is one’s personal internet brand, and negative engagement is better than no attention at all.
What’s being lost in so much of it is, as Jessica Winter put it in the New Yorker, the presence of “a mentally ill mother who tried to die and is now living out a fate worse than death”. Lost, too, have been the Clancy children – Cora, Dawson and Callan – whose short lives have been turned into fodder for Instagram likes and TikTok shares. As this case and the social media conflagration around it carry on, too many of us seem to be losing our ability to empathise while still differentiating, to grieve the unthinkable while still thinking through the complexities, to simply take a set of facts on their own terms instead of filtering them through our own political positions. Too many of those using the Clancy story for their own social media benefit have, in other words, lost their minds.
[Further reading: The chicks who dig Luigi Mangione]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment