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Lindsay Clancy had a state of mind vanishingly few will ever know. Yet she has become a cause célèbre.

Postpartum depression affects roughly 1 in 7 mothers; postpartum psychosis is extremely uncommon.

Filicide by mothers with postpartum psychosis remains extremely rare even within an already rare condition.

Compassion doesn't require Clancy to be recast as the victim.

The murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, a woman who killed her three young children, has set off nationwide discussions not just about postpartum psychosis, but about the suffering of mothers more broadly and how the mental health system treats women. For some, Clancy has become a cause célèbre.

At a rally of hundreds outside the Massachusetts courthouse where Clancy is on trial, a 52-year-old paralegal from Providence, Rhode Island told a reporter that “women are being dismissed, neglected and ignored.” On X (formerly Twitter), Republican pundit Tiffany 😀 tweeted, “Our healthcare system has failed women.” One of dozens of letters of support in court documents came from a coworker of Clancy’s, a nurse who wrote, “I could have been Lindsay. Anyone of us could have been.”

The defense argues that when Clancy killed her children, she had bipolar disorder with postpartum psychosis. On the night of the murders, they maintain, she experienced “command hallucinations” and “a delusion of influence.” As forensic psychiatrist Phillip Resnick explained, this means she not only heard a voice telling her what to do, she felt that her body had been “taken over by an external force… almost like she was a puppet and someone else was pulling the strings.”

Unlike postpartum depression, which is a mood disorder that by some estimates affects about one in seven women,........

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