01.02.2023 - by Willemijn de Bruin

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Last week Friday the news reached me via my friend Meggy – a fellow postpartum psychosis survivor (Instagram: @empowering.all.moms) – that a major tragedy took place in her home state of Massachusetts.

The news wasn’t entirely confirmed yet and had not reached beyond the USA, or at least not me via my usual Dutch and British news channels. She shared a news article and told me about a mom in Duxbury who had allegedly attempted to kill her children as well as to take her own life. Two of the three kids were confirmed dead, and the 7-month-old baby was in hospital. The same goes for the mom, who was in hospital under police custody.

This mom is called Lindsay Clancy and I stand in solidarity with her, her husband, her family and friends, and her community.

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What happened to this family is so extremely sad, and it really dawned on me that something like this could have happened to myself. Cause this is the point that many people miss – it can happen to ALL new moms – to you, your best friend, your wife, your daughter, unfortunately no one is immune for maternal mental health issues, and they are more common than you may think: with roughly one in five women suffering from some sort of pre- and/or postnatal mental health condition.*

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A week later the news has travelled the world and some of the headlines and commentary are really worrying. Not only because the mom is by some portrayed as a murderer rather than a person with a severe mental illness, but also because those who do try to come in from a mental health angle are using very wrong terminology.

It is not formally confirmed but deemed most likely that Lindsay suffered from postpartum psychosis, yet I have seen news channels report on ‘severe baby blues’ and ‘a severe case of postpartum depression’.

Let me be clear:

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• Postpartum psychosis is NOT ‘the baby blues’ - the baby blues is natural and happens to most women (around 80%) in the first few weeks after delivery. Baby blues are not even an official maternal mental health condition.

• Postpartum psychosis is also NOT the same as postpartum depression nor is it ‘severe postpartum depression’. These are entirely different maternal mental health conditions. It is like comparing apple with pears, or a heart attack with a brain seizure. Some features and symptoms may be the same, but it is not the same thing and terms should not be used interchangeably.

 

Postpartum psychosis (PPP) is a severe and acute onset mental illness that happens to 1-2 in 1000 mothers. It usually starts quite suddenly and soon after childbirth but can occur later in the first year after the child was born. Symptoms include hallucinations and delusions, often with mania, depression or confusion and it is associated with a risk of both suicide and infanticide.

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Woman can lose complete sense of reality; they may have delusions. They see and hear things that are not there – I myself thought I had a puzzle in my head and was looking for pieces and clues spread over the world and my lifetime (doesn’t make sense, does it?) – but there are also more dangerous thoughts like the devil trying to possess your baby. This condition requires acute medical care and a lady with PPP should ideally not be left alone. But that I easier said than done if you do not know yourself that you are unwell, and your partner does not even know what postpartum psychosis is. Moreover, one symptoms of PPP is paranoia so women who suffer may not trust the people around them which complicates diagnosis and accurate care even more.

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So, Lindsay was left alone with her children, and this great tragedy took place. She killed two of her children at home and the baby eventually died as well in hospital. Yet it was not her fault, it was not the fault of her husband who left her alone for a very short while, it was also not because of the COVID vaccine (believe it or not, but someone suggested this on Twitter), this is the fault of a medical health system that falls entirely short of providing adequate maternal (mental) health services.

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And no this is not just in the USA where (maternal) healthcare is known to be of low quality and inaccessible compared to other developed countries. This unfortunately happens worldwide in low-, middle- and high-income countries. Why? Because we are not just dealing with inadequate mental health services globally, we are dealing with a terrible persistent stigma around maternal mental health issues, as well as a total lack of awareness on postpartum psychosis.

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So, I guess this is not just me standing in solidarity with Lindsay, but also asking people to be willing to learn from it. As I sincerely believe that prevention of these tragedies partly lies with raising awareness and avoiding sensationalized and false headlines about “yet another crazy mom who has killed her kids”.

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* Worldwide, roughly one in five women (20%) suffer from some sort of maternal mental health (MMH) condition during their pregnancy and/or in the first year after having had their baby but this is hard to estimate as cases go undiagnosed and unregistered.** In addition to PPP, there are other maternal mental health conditions such as postpartum anxiety, postpartum obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), postpartum post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and the possibly better known but still misunderstood postpartum depression.

** I used a wide variety of sources, including the World Health Organization, the USA charity 2020mom.org, and the Maternal Mental Health Leadership Alliance in the USA.