Let me say this upfront: what happened in the Lindsay Clancy case is tragic. Three children are dead. A family has been destroyed. There is nothing about that that should be celebrated, minimized, or turned into some kind of spectacle.
But personally? I have a hard time buying the argument that postpartum mental illness should somehow transform Lindsay Clancy from the person who killed her children into the primary victim of this story.
And before somebody starts screaming at me: no, I am not saying postpartum depression isn’t real. I’m not saying postpartum psychosis isn’t real. Mental illness is real, and severe psychiatric disorders can absolutely affect a person’s perception and behavior.
But there is a difference between explaining someone’s actions and excusing them.
Someone being mentally ill does not automatically mean they are incapable of responsibility for what they do.
Because at the end of the day, three children died.
Those children didn’t choose any of this. They didn’t have the ability to defend themselves. They didn’t have the ability to understand what was happening. They were completely dependent on the adults around them to protect them.
And that’s where I struggle with the narrative surrounding this case.
There seems to be an enormous amount of sympathy directed toward Clancy because she was a mother who was supposedly suffering from a postpartum condition.
But where is that same energy for the children?
They are the ones who are dead.
I’m also skeptical of the tendency to portray Clancy primarily as a victim because she was struggling with mental illness. Again, struggling with something does not automatically make you innocent of everything you subsequently do.
We can acknowledge that someone was suffering while still saying:
You killed people.
Those two statements can exist at the same time.
And frankly, I think there is an uncomfortable double standard that deserves to be discussed here.
If this were a different defendant—particularly someone who didn’t fit the socially sympathetic image of a white suburban mother—would we be having the exact same conversation?
Would we be this eager to frame the defendant primarily through their suffering?
Or would we be talking about the victims and demanding accountability?
That’s what I mean when I talk about privilege being weaponized.
I’m not saying every white woman automatically receives special treatment. I’m saying that society has certain images of innocence and victimhood, and the image of a white mother can carry enormous cultural sympathy.
And I think we need to be willing to question that.
Because being a mother doesn’t make someone incapable of committing something horrific.
Being depressed doesn’t make someone incapable of committing something horrific.
Having a psychiatric disorder doesn’t automatically make someone incapable of committing something horrific.
And having suffered does not mean you cannot also cause suffering.
I don’t think we should erase mental illness from the conversation. Quite the opposite. We should take it seriously enough to have an honest conversation about what it actually means.
But “she was mentally ill” cannot simply become a magic phrase that ends the discussion about responsibility.
There are victims here.
And I refuse to let the conversation become so focused on the person who committed the act that we forget the people who never got a chance to grow up.
You can have compassion for someone’s suffering.
You can believe they desperately needed psychiatric help.
You can believe the mental-health system failed them.
And you can still believe they should be held accountable for what they did.
Those positions are not contradictory.
They’re called nuance.
And in a case this horrific, I think the victims deserve at least that much.