As a therapist, I have been following the Lindsay Clancy trial with a heavy chest and a lingering sense of outrage. It is a case that has horrified the public, but for those of us working in perinatal mental health, the details cut to a far deeper, more systemic level. The part I cannot shake, the part that keeps me up at night, is how a woman with total access to healthcare, medical literacy as a nurse, and financial stability was repeatedly sent home to just figure it out alone.
The system put so much emphasis on the fact that Lindsay was high functioning. Jurors are shown that she drove her kids to the doctor, played with them in the snow, and spoke clearly to her family. But nobody in the medical carousel stopped to ask the most critical question: What is the actual weight of functioning alone?
Even inside a marriage, she was functioning alone. A few hours of part-time childcare is not a structural safety net. Twenty-minute medication check-ins and short-term discharges are not wrap-around care. We are actively asking postpartum mothers to navigate terrifying, destabilizing psychological shifts inside an isolated nuclear bubble, and then we pretend a brief break or an outpatient prescription is enough.
We mistake a mother’s ability to pull it together as proof that she is okay. We mistake neatness, compliance, and logistical capability for sanity. And in doing so, we abandon women to collapse in private.
If this is how the medical system treats a privileged, insured postpartum mothers ”holy fuck.” What help actually exists for postpartum mothers without health insurance? Without money? Without a partner or family anywhere nearby?
The brutal truth is that privilege bought Lindsay Clancy a ticket into clinic rooms, but it still didn’t protect her from a broken, fragmented system that pushed her back out the door. But when we shift our lens to marginalized, uninsured, and Black mothers, the system moves from inadequate to actively destructive.
Consider the stark, unforgiving contrast of how race and class dictate who receives clinical mercy and who receives a cell. Look at the case of Latarsha Sanders, a Black mother from Brockton, Massachusetts, who killed her two children while in the grip of terrifying, undetected psychotic delusions. When her case went to trial, the court excluded thousands of pages of her medical and psychiatric records refusing to let the jury hear the depth of her mental health crisis. She was denied a proper defense on criminal responsibility, convicted of first-degree murder, and handed a life sentence without parole.
It took the states highest court to vacate her conviction years later because the legal system had stripped away her right to present a psychiatric defense.
When a privileged, white mother fractures under the weight of postpartum illness, the system debates her medical capacity and rallies around maternal mental health. When a Black mother like Latarsha Sanders fractures under a psychotic breakdown, the courts suppress her mental health assessments, deny her psychological reality, and throw away the key. Her distress is met not with specialized perinatal teams, but with criminalization, systemic erasure, and total abandonment.
Privilege doesn’t save you from a broken medical model, but the lack of privilege ensures that when you break, the system will destroy you for it.
As a therapist, and sitting in my office 327 Ottawa St. N, I look at this landscape of maternal health and feel a profound, unyielding anger. We are told that our societal systems exist to protect the most vulnerable that we care about mothers, and above all, that we care about children.
You cannot convince me that this system cares about children.
A system that cared about children would care about the minds, bodies, and emotional capacity of the mothers raising them. A system that cared about children would build free, accessible, community-based wrap-around care for every single postpartum mother, regardless of her postal code or bank account. It would not leave mothers isolated in high-rises and suburban homes, drowning in sleep deprivation and terrifying intrusive thoughts, waiting weeks for a 15-minute phone consultation.
A system that cared about children would not penalize Black and brown mothers for the structural poverty and medical neglect it forced upon them. It would not suppress their clinical evaluations, lock them away, and then act shocked when the seams inevitably split.
We are operating inside a healthcare culture that views postpartum care as an individual responsibility rather than a collective, structural obligation. We tell mothers to “reach out,” but when they do, they are met with waitlists, high out-of-pocket costs, and a quick push out the door. We leave families to sink or swim, and then we express outrage at the wreckage when they drown.
“Functioning” is not the same as being safe. And survival should not be a luxury reserved for those who can afford private care.
From where I stand working alongside clinicians at 327 Ottawa St. N, who see the deep, unaddressed trauma of systemic failure every single day it is clear that we do not just need “awareness.” We need a complete, radical overhaul of how we treat mothers. We need to burn down the idea that a mother must be completely disintegrated before she deserves real, hands-on, community support.
Until we stop weaponizing “functioning” and start building actual safety nets for all mothers irrespective of race, wealth, or privilege the system will continue to fail the very children it claims to value.
Book an appointment with Shamilla James MSW, RSW