Lindsey Clancy Asked for Help and the System Didn’t Catch her. What Happens to the Women Who Don’t Even Ask?

by Jessica Anne Pressler LCSW

I haven’t been able to sleep well since I started following the Lindsey Clancy case. Not because of the trial itself, or what a jury in Massachusetts will ultimately decide. What has kept me up is one detail that keeps surfacing in the coverage. By the accounts that have come out of that courtroom this was a woman who asked for help. She saw a psychiatrist. She was hospitalized. She told her own family, months before the unthinkable happened, that she was having thoughts of harming her children. She reached, more than once, into a system, hoping it would catch her.

And it didn’t catch her

That is a sentence I can’t get out of my head. Because if a woman who does what we tell women in crisis to do could still fall through, what does that mean for the far larger number of women who never ask at all. The research bears this out, starkly. A 2024 study on public stigma toward perinatal mental health conditions found that postpartum psychosis carries among the highest levels of public stigma of any postpartum experienced studied, and the mothers routinely avoid disclosing symptoms out of the fear of being judged, unfit, dangerous, or at risk of losing custody of their children (Cooke et al., 2024, Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders). A separate international review of women’s lived experience of postpartum depression and psychosis describe the same pattern from the inside; women describing a cultural expectation that mothers be endlessly happy and strong, and a self-stigma so deep that some described feeling stigma toward their own diagnosis before anyone else even weighed in. (Fusar-Poli et al.,2025, Woeld Psychiatry; Forde et al.,2019). Families do this too. Out of love, out of fear, out of their own shame, they sometimes minimize what they are seeing rather than naming it, because naming it feels like admitting something is unforgivable. It isn’t. But shame doesn’t know that.

This is also, often, a story about isolation, and sometimes about control. A 2024 systematic review and Meta analysis on coercive control, found consistent, significant associations between coercive control, and depression, anxiety, and trauma symptoms in women. (Lohmann et al., 2024, Trauma, Violence, & Abuse). Separately, a large Meta analysis of cohort studies found that women who experienced violence from a partner were at meaningfully higher risk of postpartum depression than women who did not (Zhang et al., 2019, European Psychiatry). A woman managing small children, and a partner who minimizes, isolate, or quietly controls her isn’t just unsupported. She is at elevated clinical risk, and she is often the least able to say so.

So, what actually helps? Research points to an answer that will surprise no one who does this work; connection. In a large German study of postpartum women, higher levels of social support were consistently tied to fewer barriers to seeking help, and the author specified recommended psychoeducation for women and the people around them routinely screening, and public campaigns to reduce stigma and shame (Harder et al., 2025, BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, the INVITE study). In plain terms; no one should be doing this with one exhausted partner, one fifteen-minute appointment, and a prescription refilled over the phone. It takes a team, a psychiatrist, a therapist, a family doctor, a genuinely present partner, pure support group of women who have been actually where she is, and often a social worker who can hold every piece of that team together and notice quickly when one piece goes quiet.

And when the picture includes real warning signs, a mother describing thoughts of harming her child, hearing or seeing things that aren’t there, a break from reality that has to be treated as an emergency. Postpartum psychosis classified in the DSM 5TR under brief psychotic disorder “with peripartum onset,” can escalate within days. It calls for immediate psychiatric evaluation and very often temporary separation from children while she is stabilized. I know how heart wrenching that is for a family to do. It can feel like the cruelest possible choice. It is instead, very often, what makes a full, permanent reunion with her children possible at all. Treated in time postpartum psychosis is highly treatable, and most women recover completely.

None of it works, though, if shame gets to a woman before her village does. We have made progress on maternal mental health, but progress isn’t finished until asking for help feels safer than staying quiet. I want us to build a community where a woman’s honest, terrifying disclosure is met immediately with team of compassionate, nonjudgemental, empathetic, educated people, so that reaching out even once is enough.

References

Cooke, D. L., McCarty, R. J., Budd, S., Ordway, A., Roussos-Ross, D., Mathews, C. A., McNamara, J. P. H., & Guastello, A. D. (2024). Public stigma and recognition of perinatal obsessive-compulsive disorder. Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders, 40.

Forde, R., et al. (2019). Psychological interventions for managing postpartum psychosis: A qualitative analysis of women's and family members' experiences and preferences. BMC Psychiatry, 19, 411.

Fusar-Poli, L., et al. (2025). The lived experience of postpartum depression and psychosis in women: A bottom-up review co-written by experts by experience and academics. World Psychiatry.

Lohmann, S., Cowlishaw, S., Ney, L., O'Donnell, M., & Felmingham, K. (2024). The trauma and mental health impacts of coercive control: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 25(1), 630-647.

Zhang, S., et al. (2019). Maternal violence experiences and risk of postpartum depression: A meta-analysis of cohort studies. European Psychiatry, 55, 90-101.

Harder, M. S., Seefeld, L., Schellong, J., & Garthus-Niegel, S. (2025). Associated factors of barriers to help-seeking among postpartum women with and without (childbirth-related) posttraumatic stress disorder: Results from the cross-sectional study INVITE. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, 25, 1273.

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed., text rev.). Brief Psychotic Disorder, with peripartum onset specifier.