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Bethany Mandel is co-author of ‘Stolen Youth: How radicals are erasing innocence and indoctrinating a generation’ and editor of children’s book publisher heroes of freedom
Innocent children killed. A young family destroyed. Horrified America.
Surely someone is to blame.
But who?
Last month, a Massachusetts mother, Lindsay Clancy, 32, was arrested for the heinous crime of murdering her three children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months.
He allegedly strangled them with an exercise band before jumping from his second-story bedroom window. She broke her back and is paralyzed.
Along with the rest of the country, I read about it between my fingers pressed against my face.
I am a newly postpartum mother. I wrote this column on my laptop from the kitchen counter while wearing my one-month-old son in a sling. He was jumping while I was writing.
The details of what happened in that house in Duxbury, Massachusetts, are almost unimaginable. It makes us sick to our stomachs. But walking away accomplishes nothing.
I say that the alleged crime is ‘almost’ unimaginable, because it is not ‘totally’ unimaginable. It’s called infanticide. It has happened before.
In 2001, Texas mother Andrea Yates confessed to drowning her five children in the bathtub and there are others. Every 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 am lucky. I am 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 hormonal changes after birth are jarring.
Innocent children killed. A young family destroyed. Horrified America. Surely someone is to blame. But who?
Last month, a Massachusetts mother, Lindsay Clancy, 32, was arrested for the heinous crime of murdering her three children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months.
It is common to feel painfully lonely when surrounded by small children. The world around you doesn’t seem to know, or worse, doesn’t seem to care about the emotional roller coaster you’re now on.
Mothers are judged by everything they do. The pressure can be overwhelming. The bar for new moms can be set unattainably high.
One of the sicker ironies of Lindsay’s story is that she also worked as a labor and delivery nurse. She was the person new moms gave their fragile newborns to. But she Lindsay killed her own.
Why do women feel lonely, detached and hopeless in the days, weeks and months after giving birth?
I can’t solve this question. But in this case, American moms are watching and listening for the answers.
According to state prosecutors, Lindsay Clancy is a cold, calculating killer.
They say the murders had been meticulously planned with Lindsay sending her husband, Patrick, on an errand for about 25 minutes to buy himself enough time to kill.
On Tuesday, she was arraigned via video link from her hospital bed and charged with first degree murder: premeditated intentional murder.
His defense attorney Kevin Reddington tells a different story.
He claims the murders were the result of “a moment of psychosis” and over-medication. Supposedly, Lindsay had been prescribed 13 different medications, at various times, over the previous 8 months.
I wasn’t taking all these pills at once, but they included benzodiazepines; 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 that the amount of medication he was prescribed was “too high, no doubt”. These are medicines that can help, but if you take too many it can affect your judgment.’
Reddington says Lindsay heard a man tell her to “kill the children and kill yourself because it was your last chance.”
Dr. Maslow noted that, ‘[These drugs] they have side effects and some may include altered mental status.’
Despite all this, the prosecutor is downplaying his mental health.
On Tuesday, she was arraigned via video link from her hospital bed and charged with first degree murder: premeditated intentional murder.
He allegedly strangled them with an exercise band before jumping from his second-story bedroom window. She broke her back and is paralyzed.
The state’s attorney says she was never diagnosed with postpartum depression. He even wrote on his phone that he was experiencing just a “touch of postpartum anxiety.”
The reality is that Lindsay Clancy was a ‘zombie’ according to her husband.
In addition to the drug cocktail, he spent five days in an inpatient facility at McLean Psychiatric Hospital less than three weeks earlier.
That’s not ‘a touch’ of postpartum anxiety. That is a full-blown mental health crisis; one that Lindsay was dealing with as doctors administered more medication for the problem.
American mothers now see how Lindsay was treated by the medical and now legal system with a similar degree of neglect.
Why did you say you were only experiencing a “touch” of anxiety when the reality was probably much more dire?
Perhaps because he knew that the support he so badly needed was not going to come.
Maybe because she spent eight months asking for help and was sent packing with a bunch of prescriptions.
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 was not fully warned about.
Now, after every loving mother’s worst nightmare, she is painted as a monster.
Prosecutors are promoting the idea that this woman, who spent months on pills and nearly a week in a psychiatric facility, did not have a mental health condition.
In her narration, she is evil.
In a way, treating Lindsay like this allows the rest of us to separate ourselves from her. Her struggles are not like ours.
But isn’t that at the heart of it all?
Lindsay was probably removed from reality. Her treatment was withdrawn from her health. Americans are growing further apart from each other. As I wrote, there are no easy answers.
The sad reality is that Lindsay and her husband will never recover from the death of their children. And the new mothers will see what happened to Lindsay and it will make them think.
Should they seek help for postpartum depression? Or will your doctor just literally medicate you crazy? And if, God forbid, they have the same ideas, will they be treated like criminals?
The Clancy kids will never get a chance to grow up. Their smiling faces in the photos haunt us. We know what his final moments must have been like.
But they are not the only victims; their parents are too.
American mothers are learning lessons from the Lindsay Clancy case. None of them is good.