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LINDSAY CLANCY’S CASE PUT A SPOTLIGHT ON PARTS OF MOTHERHOOD WE
DON’T TALK ABOUT  
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Candice Norwood
September 4, 2026
The 19th
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_ The case ended in a mistrial — but the frustrations raised by
women around maternal mental health and racial inequities aren’t
going away. _

Defendant Lindsay Clancy awaits the start of proceedings at the
Plymouth Superior Court in Plymouth, Massachussets,

 

The nearly six-week murder trial for Lindsay Clancy, a woman accused
of strangling her three children before attempting to kill herself in
2023, has been a fixture for women across the United States. Some
gathered inside and outside the courthouse in Plymouth, Massachusetts,
to show support for Clancy. Others posted videos on social media
detailing their opinions on the case or sharing the ways Clancy’s
story resonated with their own.

Clancy’s defense team had argued that the former labor and delivery
nurse should not be held criminally responsible for the deaths of her
children because she had been experiencing postpartum psychosis
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a life-threatening medical condition that alters a person’s
perception of reality after childbirth. About 1 to 2 in every 1,000
people experience postpartum psychosis after giving birth, research
shows [[link removed]]. 

Her lawyers said Clancy sought extensive treatment that included,
according to court testimony, more than a dozen visits with multiple
psychiatric and medical providers and prescriptions for 13 different
medications in the four months leading up to the killings.

On Friday, Judge William Sullivan said he would declare a mistrial
after the jury deliberated for more than 30 hours over nearly seven
days and could not reach a unanimous verdict. Sullivan gave Clancy’s
defense attorney Kevin Reddington one hour to file an emergency stay
with a higher court, which would temporarily pause the ruling. A state
supreme court judge denied the stay; Sullivan officially declared a
mistrial.

[An older man in sunglasses and a light gray suit is surrounded by
reporters, cameras and microphones as he speaks outside a building.]

Lindsay Clancy’s defense attorney Kevin Reddington is surrounded by
reporters while leaving the Plymouth Superior Court during the jury
deliberation phase of Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial in Plymouth,
Massachusetts, on September 2, 2026. (JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP/Getty
Images)

Clancy’s difficult medical history — and the ultimate tragedy of
three young lives taken too soon — has elevated a very different
version of motherhood from the perfectly curated school lunches and
multi-thousand-dollar birthday parties that flood women’s social
media feeds. For many, the Clancy trial has become a mirror reflecting
their own difficult, uncomfortable and sometimes scary experiences
with motherhood. For others, it has sparked debates about race and
privilege, as well as questions about which groups of mothers receive
sympathy.

“There's so much pressure to be this ideal mother that's White,
heterosexual, able-bodied, upper class,” said Margaret M. Quinlan, a
professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “So, the
media fury around this that we're seeing online is less about the
verdict and more about defending motherhood itself.”

MENTAL HEALTH CONCERNS COME WITH STIGMA AND GAPS IN CARE 

The corner of the internet dedicated to the Clancy case includes
hundreds of thousands of TikTok videos, Instagram reels and posts to
message boards like Reddit. It is an overwhelming stream of daily
updates on the trial from true crime influencers, heated arguments
over whether Clancy killed her children at all, videos of mothers
holding their crying children with the words “Same, Lindsay” on
the screen, and a viral reenactment of an unproven conspiracy theory
featuring Bratz dolls in a shoebox replica of the crime scene.

In the midst of that noise, some women posting online are sharing a
real truth: mothering in America is hard, and mothers experiencing
mental health concerns often lack community spaces and grace from the
public to speak about it openly. 

“I had no sense of reality,” one woman said in an August 21 TikTok
video
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discussing her postpartum psychosis. “I thought that I was either a
prophet or Jesus trying to heal people.”

“I did not understand that I was sick and needed help,” she
continued. “You don’t know when you’re hallucinating that
you’re hallucinating, at least in my experience. I thought it was
all very real.” 

This mother got the care she needed and, she remarked, has been doing
well in the year since. But for other women and postpartum people,
multiple factors can affect access to treatment, said Elizabeth
DeVore, clinical assistant professor at the University of Michigan,
where she works as a reproductive psychiatrist.

[A crowd, many dressed in pink, gathers outside a courthouse in bright
sunlight. Several people hold phones while two people in the
foreground hold hands.]Supporters of Lindsay Clancy gather outside of
Plymouth Superior Court on August 20, 2026. (John Tlumacki/The Boston
Globe/Getty Images)

Insurance coverage is frequently a first barrier, DeVore said. For
example, before 2021, federal law required pregnancy-related Medicaid
coverage for patients only for up to 60 days after childbirth. The
American Rescue Plan passed by Congress and signed by President Joe
Biden in 2021 gave states a new option to extend postpartum Medicaid
coverage to 12 months after childbirth.

Still, physicians may not have the training to properly identify
postpartum mental health conditions even if the new parent has the
necessary insurance coverage, DeVore said. Recent studies
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suggest that only between 5 and 13 percent of pregnant people were
being screened for depression, and only 4 to 9 percent of postpartum
people were being screened, DeVore said. Even for those who do get
screenings, only about half receive follow-up care.

That leaves many postpartum parents in the dark as they try to grapple
with caring for a newborn on top of trying to understand their anxiety
or depression without adequate resources. 

There’s also the shame.

Postpartum parents manage a complex web of emotions — from
excitement to fears about their child’s health and happiness and
worries that they are not good enough parents. Those with anxiety and
depression may also feel guilt under the weight of society’s
expectations, which demand that parents think or behave in specific
acceptable ways. 

“I think one of the hardest things about being a new mother with a
mental health condition is that oftentimes you have these sort of
layers that stack up on each other,” DeVore said.

“There's a lot of pressure and a lot of conflation between varying
degrees of mental health conditions, and I think all that like guilt
and shame makes it a lot harder to tell your loved ones that you're
struggling and to reach out for help,” DeVore said.

The rise of internet culture and the volume of social media depicting
picture-perfect parenthood have exacerbated these feelings.

Mothers often compare themselves to what they see online, according to
research from Ciera Kirkpatrick, an assistant professor of advertising
and public relations at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who has
studied how idealized portrayals of motherhood on social media
influence the mental health and well-being of new mothers. Videos with
more realistic discussions about the anxiety, resentment or loneliness
that can come with motherhood help them feel more confident and less
alone in their experience, she said.

These factors help explain why thousands of women have become invested
in Clancy’s case. Researchers told The 19th that the unsettling
details offer an opportunity for people who may not feel supported or
heard after giving birth to find community online and voice their
frustrations. Many also see the trial as an example of injustice in
the court system, a controversial point for those who argue that the
volume of support for Clancy overshadows the reality that three
children were killed.

RACE INFLUENCES IF AND HOW MOTHERS RECEIVE SYMPATHY 

For others following the case, Clancy’s trial cannot be divorced
from conversations about race, class and a longstanding frustration
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with the amount of media and public attention given to crime cases
that center White women. 

One creator on TikTok
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who said she has a background in criminal public defense stated that
she is encouraged to see the Clancy case activate White women to look
for injustices in the criminal legal system — and she does not want
those efforts to end there.

“What bothers me about all of this support for Lindsay is the fact
that this support is selective. Black mothers are mistreated by
police, and the system, and the judges and doctors.” She encouraged
people to become “court watchers,” groups of trained volunteers
who attend court proceedings and document potential inequities they
observe. 

On TikTok and Reddit threads, women have brought up the case of
Latarsha Sanders, a Massachusetts mother and a Black woman convicted
in 2022 of killing her two sons. Sanders’ defense team argued that
she was not criminally responsible for the killing of her children
because she experienced a psychotic break — a similar argument made
by Clancy’s lawyers. The charges brought against Sanders came from
the same district attorney’s office prosecuting Clancy, and the same
judge presided over both women’s trials.

[A gravestone for two children, Edson and Lason Brito, is surrounded
by toys, flowers and superhero figurines, with a photo of the boys
displayed near the top.]Toys and flowers surround the headstone of
Edson Brito and La’Son Brito at Melrose Cemetery on November 21,
2025. Their mother, Latarsha Sanders, was convicted of two counts of
first-degree murder, but Massachusetts’ highest court ordered a new
trial last month after finding that jurors in the first trial did not
have access to her full psychiatric history. Erin Clark/The Boston
Globe/Getty Images)

Sanders was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder; in
Massachusetts, each count carries a mandatory life sentence. But then
last month, the state’s supreme court ordered a new trial on the
basis that the jury in her first trial did not have access to her full
psychiatric history because the trial judge had ruled some of her
medical records inadmissible. 

Danielle Slakoff, a criminologist who analyzes the intersection of
race and gender in media coverage of crime, said research indicates
that women of color who commit crimes tend to be portrayed more
frequently as bad people or bad mothers. Meanwhile, the public tends
to have more sympathetic justifications for White women who commit
crimes, depicting them as if they are driven by a circumstance out of
their control, including mental health concerns, rather than being
“bad” as a person, said Slakoff, who is an associate professor of
criminal justice at California State University, Sacramento.

Slakoff has observed a similar tone in the coverage and conversations
about Clancy’s case. “This is an important opportunity to talk
about mental illness, to talk about postpartum depression, postpartum
psychosis. I think that's all very true,” she said. “I do also
think that it's worthy of taking a step back to ask: ‘What are the
factors that play into why this is getting so much attention?’”

She and other researchers noted that discussing the Clancy trial is
complicated and multiple things can be true at once. Women encounter
systemic barriers that take a toll on their health and quality of
life. And in many cases, society overlooks the ways women of color can
experience the weight and stigma of these challenges more harshly.

They expressed hope that the spotlight on the real impacts of these
inequitable systems is not lost in the true-crime-style attention on
Clancy’s case.

“This case is exposing long-term trends about mental health, medical
expertise, the expectation of mothers to be perfect, self-sacrificing,
self-resilient,” Quinlan said. “A guilty or not guilty verdict
doesn't really resolve the larger issue that's resonating with so many
women online.”

_I’m __CANDICE NORWOOD_
[[link removed]]_, The 19th’s justice
reporter, primarily covering incarceration, law enforcement and the
judiciary. Since 2016, I’ve covered all things politics and policy
for The Atlantic, Bloomberg News, PBS NewsHour and other publications
in the Washington, D.C.-area._

_The 19th_ [[link removed]]_ is an independent, nonprofit
newsroom reporting on gender, politics, policy and power. Our goal is
to empower all women and LGBTQ+ people — particularly those excluded
from the promise of the 19th Amendment by their gender, race,
ethnicity, class or disability — with the information they need to
be equal participants in our democracy. _

* Lindsay Clancy
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* mental health
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* motherhood
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* postpartum depression
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* criminal justice
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