PacFu the Mystical Ninja

I’m a mother. I had severe postpartum OCD and anxiety. I know what it feels like to be terrified by your own brain after having a baby. I got through it because I had an incredibly supportive husband and a doctor who regularly called and texted to make sure I was okay. Lindsay Clancy was asking for help too. In the four months before her children died, she was prescribed 13 different psychiatric medications by multiple providers, more than 30 prescriptions total. Before you reduce this case to “evil mother,” ask why a postpartum woman could repeatedly seek psychiatric help, take that many medications, become increasingly unwell, and still end up at home in that condition. And this is part of a much bigger problem. Our system is very good at writing prescriptions and much worse at actually supporting women postpartum. There is far more money in medication than there is in months of therapy, sleep support, home help, frequent follow-up, and someone actually looking at the whole person. That does not mean psychiatric medication is bad. It saves lives. But if a woman is given 13 different medications in four months and is still deteriorating, “she was being treated” should not end the conversation. It should start a much harder one about why she was getting worse while everyone kept changing the prescription. Postpartum psychosis is super rare, roughly 1–2 per 1,000 births, but it can involve hallucinations, delusions, and a complete break from reality. You can grieve those children, hold the horror of what happened, and still recognize that this woman appears to have been failed long before that night. If your only takeaway is hatred for the mother, you’re ignoring the part of this tragedy that could actually prevent the next one.