Bethany Mandel is co-author of ‘Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation’ and editor of the children’s book publisher Heroes of Liberty
Innocent children killed. A young family destroyed. America horrified.
Surely, someone is to blame.
But who?
Last month, a Massachusetts mother, Lindsay Clancy, 32, was arrested for the sickening crime of murdering her three kids, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months.
She allegedly strangled them with an exercise band before jumping from her second-floor bedroom window. She broke her back and is paralyzed.
Along with the rest of the country, I read about this between the fingers of hands pressed to my face.
I’m a recently postpartum mother. I wrote this column on my laptop from the kitchen counter while wearing my one-month-old son in a sling. He bounced as I typed.
The details of what happened in that Duxbury, Massachusetts home are nearly unimaginable. It makes us sick to our stomachs. But turning away accomplishes nothing.
I say the alleged crime is ‘nearly’ unimaginable – because it’s not ‘totally’ unimaginable. It’s called infanticide. It’s happened before.
In 2001, Texas mom Andrea Yates confessed to drowning her five children in the bathtub and there are others. Each story is a nightmare.
But these aren’t just true crime tales to gawk at. These tragedies are about maternal health and how we should treat and talk about postpartum depression.
I’m fortunate. I’m mentally healthy. Violence has never crossed my mind. But even under the best of circumstances, after having multiple children (my new baby is my sixth) the post-birth hormonal changes are jarring.
Innocent children killed. A young family destroyed. America horrified. Surely, someone is to blame. But who?
Last month, a Massachusetts mother, Lindsay Clancy, 32, was arrested for the sickening crime of murdering her three kids, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months.
It’s common to feel painfully alone while surrounded by young children. The world around you doesn’t seem to know – or worse – doesn’t seem to care about the emotional rollercoaster you’ve now found yourself on.
Mother are judged for everything they do. The pressure can be crushing. The bar for new moms can be set unattainably high.
One of the sickest ironies of Lindsay’s story is that she also worked as a labor and delivery nurse. She was the person to whom new moms hand their fragile newborns. But Lindsay killed her own.
Why do women feel lonely, detached, and hopeless in the days, weeks and months following childbirth?
I can’t resolve this question. But in this case, American moms are watching and we’re listening for answers.
According to state prosecutors, Lindsay Clancy is a cold and calculating murderer.
They say the killings had been meticulously planned with Lindsay sending her husband, Patrick, on an errand for about 25 minutes to buy her enough time to kill.
On Tuesday, she was arraigned by video conference from her hospital bed and charged with first-degree murder – willful premediated murder.
Her defense attorney Kevin Reddington tells a different story.
He claims the killings were the result of ‘a moment of psychosis’ and over-medication. Lindsay had allegedly been prescribed 13 different drugs, at various times, in the months before her death.
She wasn’t on all these pills at once, but they included benzodiazepine; a depressant, fluoxetine; an antidepressant, zolpidem to help her sleep and quetiapine fumarate for bipolar disorder.
Dr Gary Maslow, a psychiatrist at Duke University, told DailyMail.com the number of drugs prescribed to her were, ‘way too high for sure. These are medicines that can help, but if you take too many, it can impair your judgment.’
Reddington says Lindsay heard a man telling her, ‘to kill the kids and kill herself because it was her last chance’.
Dr Maslow noted that, ‘[These drugs] have side effects and some can include an alteration of mental state.’
Despite all this, the prosecutor is downplaying her mental health.
On Tuesday, she was arraigned by video conference from her hospital bed and charged with first-degree murder – willful premediated murder.
She allegedly strangled them with an exercise band before jumping from her second-floor bedroom window. She broke her back and is paralyzed.
The state attorney says she was never diagnosed with postpartum depression. She even wrote on her phone that she was experiencing just a ‘touch of postpartum anxiety.’
The reality is Lindsay Clancy was a ‘zombie’ according to her husband.
Beside the drug cocktail, she spent five days in an in-patient facility at McLean psychiatric hospital less than three weeks prior.
That’s not ‘a touch’ of postpartum anxiety. That’s a full-blown mental health crisis; one that Lindsay was grappling with as doctors threw more medications at the problem.
American mothers now see how Lindsay was treated by the medical and now the legal system with a similar degree of neglect.
Why did she say she was only experiencing a ‘touch’ of anxiety when the reality was likely much more dire?
Perhaps because she knew the support she so desperately needed wasn’t coming.
Perhaps because she spent eight months asking for help and was sent packing with a hand full of prescription slips.
Bethany Mandel is co-author of ‘Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation’
Perhaps because she was ‘treated’ with drugs whose side-effects – her husband claims – she wasn’t fully warned about.
Now in the aftermath of any loving mother’s worst nightmare, she’s being painted as a monster.
Prosecutors are promoting the idea that this woman, who spent months on pills and almost a week in an inpatient psychiatric facility wasn’t suffering from a mental health condition.
In their telling, she is evil.
In a way, treating Lindsay like this allows the rest of us to detach from her. Her struggles are not like ours.
But isn’t that at the heart of all this?
Lindsay was likely removed from reality. Her treatment was removed from her health. Americans are increasingly removed from one another. As I wrote, there are no easy answers.
The sad reality is Lindsay and her husband will never recover from their children’s deaths. And new mothers will see what happened to Lindsay and it will give them pause.
Should they seek help for postpartum depression; or will their doctor just medicate them literally out of their minds? And if, God forbid, they have the same ideations, will they be treated like criminals?
The Clancy children will never have a chance to grow up. Their smiling faces in photos haunt us. We know what their final moments must have been like.
But they aren’t the only victims; their parents are as well.
American mothers are learning lessons from the case of Lindsay Clancy. None of them are good.
DailyMail
