Mass psychosis !!!! How Lindsay Clancy become a more compelling victim than her three children who she brutally killed?

 

Outside Plymouth Superior Court in Massachusetts this week, Americans are witnessing something resembling a mass psychosis event.

Hundreds of women have assembled to support Lindsay Clancy, the mother on trial for murdering her three young children.

Clancy does not deny killing 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan with her own hands.

Her defense argues that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and therefore cannot be held criminally responsible.

The women outside the courthouse, holding babies while cheering for Clancy, have no such excuse.

Unless, that is, we want to talk about what social media has done to women’s ability to process tragedy, assign responsibility and distinguish between victim and perpetrator.

Imagine the conversation at home as Mom puts on pink and heads off to spend the day with hundreds of other women cheering as members of Clancy’s defense team drive past.

“Mom, who’s the woman you’re making heart hands at?”

“A woman who strangled her three children!”

For the families of these women, alarm bells should be ringing.

For the rest of us, it’s worth asking how we reached a cultural moment in which the woman who killed three children has somehow become a more compelling victim than the children themselves.

Some of Clancy’s supporters aren’t coming to rally for her alone; they’re bringing their own kids along.

Those children look at their mothers the way children always have: as the person charged above all others with loving, protecting and caring for them.

The last image Cora, Dawson and Callan saw was that person violently taking their lives.

Whatever Clancy’s mental state, that is the horror at the center of this case.

Yet somehow the three dead children have receded into the background — while an online community obsesses over the suffering of the woman who killed them.

There are serious questions to ask about postpartum psychosis, psychiatric medication and the medical care Clancy received before the murders.

Her mental state is central to the criminal case, and a jury will decide whether it absolves her of legal responsibility.

But compassion for mental illness does not require turning a woman who killed three children into a folk hero.

Clancy’s supporters insist that “the system failed her,” a phrase that conveniently transfers agency from an individual to an amorphous collection of individuals and institutions.

But by every available account, Clancy had extraordinary support.

She saw multiple medical providers who prescribed and adjusted psychiatric medications.

Both sets of grandparents were involved.The family used daycare and a nanny.

Her husband took months of paternity leave and later worked from home so he could help his struggling wife.

Then, on the day her children died, Clancy asked her husband Patrick to leave the house to pick up dinner and medication.

While he was gone, she killed all three of their children.

The women standing outside the courthouse have inexplicably assigned Patrick as the villain of the story.

There is something especially strange about watching women who consider themselves feminists embrace Lindsay Clancy.

Women have spent generations demanding to be treated as full moral actors: capable of making decisions, accepting consequences, holding positions of authority and being judged by the same standards as men.

Yet confronted with a woman who committed one of the most horrific acts imaginable, suddenly agency becomes negotiable.

A woman can run a corporation, command soldiers, perform surgery, raise children and lead a country — but when she commits an atrocity, an army of women materializes to explain that “the system” did it to her.

Cora, Dawson and Callan cannot tell us what happened in their home that night.

They cannot explain their fear or ask strangers to remember them.

They cannot organize rallies, make TikToks or wear matching colors.

Their mother has an entire movement doing that for her.

And it’s worth noting that she’s not asking them to stop, or to shift their sympathies to the children she killed.

A culture that extends compassion to a mentally ill woman while forgetting the three children she murdered has not become more empathetic; it has lost all sense of morality.

When mothers gather outside a courthouse with their own children in their arms to cheer for a mother who strangled hers, perhaps the most disturbing question isn’t what happened to Lindsay Clancy’s mind.

It’s what has happened to ours.

Bethany Mandel writes and podcasts at The Mom Wars.