Lindsay Clancy Was Breaking And Everyone Said She Was Fine

**Tony Brueski** (0:00)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:11)
Every woman listening or watching this has heard some version of this sentence. Maybe it was aimed at her. Maybe she watched it land on someone she loves. You have three healthy kids. What could possibly be wrong? Or insert something here. Well, you have this. What could possibly be wrong?
Lindsay Clancy knew what was wrong. She couldn't feel anything. Not sadness, not joy, not the connection. She was so desperately wanting to feel when she held her eight-month-old son. She described it as numbness and she knew it wasn't right. She knew something was wrong. A fog so thick she couldn't make a plan, couldn't carry one out, couldn't shut her own mind off long enough to sleep. She wrote in her journal that her brain wouldn't stop cycling through what someone needed from her next. She wrote that she was drowning. She wasn't hiding any of this. She told her husband, she told her mother, she told her friend, AB. Bevin's that medication was giving her dark thoughts. She messaged her providers and went to emergency room. She checked herself into a locked psychiatric ward on New Year's Eve. She did everything the system tells a new mother to do when something is wrong.
If you're sitting here looking for the evidence of what she was planning, she was trying to get better. Her plan was to get better. That's what she was planning. There's all the evidence that points to her planning to try and get better by going to medical professionals to help her get there.
She planned to get better. And she tried and asked and took every possible route she could take to get there.
By January 23, she had been prescribed 13 psychiatric medications in four months. By at least five different providers. As we've been learning in court, the number gets closer to 30 She was still getting worse. She was so convinced something was fundamentally broken inside her that she searched online for whether she was a psychopath. Nobody had given her a name for what was happening. The numbness was the only thing that she could point to.
Here's what the world looks like when you've just had a baby in America. People bring food. They ask how the baby's sleeping. They tell you to enjoy every minute because it goes by so fast. Your phone fills up with golden hour photos from other mothers in matching outfits and date night selfies at six weeks postpartum. Captions about how hard it is but worth it. The message comes from everywhere and it never stops. This is supposed to be the best time of your life. Lindsay Clancy had three children under five, born between 2017 and May of 22 She'd been a labor and delivery nurse who spent her career helping other mothers through the hardest moments of theirs. She'd had postpartum anxiety after her first child and again after her second. Both times she managed it with exercise, meditation, therapy. She knew what postpartum struggles felt like from both sides of the hospital bed. After Callan, what showed up was different. The anxiety was worse. The sleep disappeared entirely. And then something new arrives that she couldn't name. A disconnection from her own life that went beyond sadness or baby blues. She tried to describe it in her journal. She wrote about stopping breastfeeding for her mental health. She felt devastated by the decision. Guilt that Callan preferred breast milk. Guilty that she'd made a medical choice and it still felt like failure. She tried sleep training him and listened to him cry for over an hour without going in because the doctors told it was the right thing to do. She wrote hearing him cry for one plus hours is not and not intervening just about killed me. In the same entry, I even said the words, I want to die to Pat. That's not a woman who's unhappy about having a baby. That's a woman whose illness was feeding on every normal decision motherhood asked her to make. The guilt wasn't about parenting choices. It was the illness consumed as it was what the illness consumed as fuel.
The numbness scared her more than the guilt. She told providers she felt completely hopeless. She journaled about brain fog so dense, she couldn't think past the next nap time. I have crazy brain fog, she wrote. I feel like I can't make a plan. I can't carry it out. And another entry, I'm so desperate to get a mental break from taking care of everyone that my mind is trying to make something physically wrong with me. Her journal kept circling the same confession. My mind never shuts off. It's constantly thinking of the next thing someone needs. I can't shut it off. Those entries were written by a woman documenting her own collapse in real time. She knew something was breaking. She just couldn't get anyone to treat it as the emergency it was.