The Day VillageFor Began

Content warning: This essay discusses postpartum psychosis, suicide, the deaths of children, and severe maternal mental illness. Please take care while reading.

On January 25, 2023, I opened a news story that made me feel physically sick.

The night before, in Duxbury, Massachusetts, three children had been killed in their home. Their mother, Lindsay Clancy, had attempted to take her own life.

Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old.

I lived about 45 minutes away. Like so many people across Massachusetts, I read every update trying to understand something that could not be understood. I thought about those children. I thought about their father, Patrick, returning home to a life that had been destroyed while he was gone. And I thought about Lindsay.

Then I texted Cait.

She was the only person I knew I could say it to without having to explain myself: I felt unbearable grief for those children and profound sympathy for their mother.

January 25, 2023, was also the day the idea for VillageFor began.

Cait and I have never spoken publicly about that connection. We knew how easily it could be misunderstood. We knew the anger surrounding this case. We understood why people did not want to hear Lindsay’s name spoken alongside words like compassion, illness or victim.

Most of all, we never wanted the lives of Cora, Dawson and Callan to become background information in a story about maternal mental health. They were not a headline. They were not evidence in an argument. They were three children with personalities, relationships and futures.

They should have grown up.

They should have played outside again, laughed with each other, fought with their parents, learned to drive, fallen in love and become whoever they were going to become. Their father should have had the ordinary privilege of watching it all happen.

All of that was taken from them.

Today, opening statements began in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial in Plymouth Superior Court. The facts of what happened to the children are not in dispute. The question before the jury is whether Lindsay was criminally responsible at the time.

Prosecutors argue that she acted deliberately and understood what she was doing. Her defense argues that she was experiencing postpartum psychosis and could not understand or control her actions. Over the coming weeks, jurors will hear competing accounts of her behavior, medical treatment and state of mind.

This essay cannot decide that legal question. That belongs to the jury.

But as the founders of a maternal mental health company, we cannot pretend this case has nothing to do with our work. Silence would be easier. It would also be dishonest.

The mother we recognized

When I say we saw ourselves in Lindsay, I am not talking about the violence.

I am talking about the woman described before that night.

A mother of three. A labor and delivery nurse. Someone who, according to the people who knew her, deeply loved and cared for her children. A woman struggling through her third postpartum period while trying to understand why her own mind no longer felt like a safe place to live.

We recognized the mother who knew something was wrong and kept trying to find help.

In the months before the children died, Lindsay sought psychiatric treatment, reported severe anxiety and insomnia, was prescribed multiple medications and admitted herself to psychiatric care. According to current reporting, the tragedy occurred only 19 days after she was discharged from a psychiatric hospital.

Civil lawsuits filed by Lindsay and Patrick now allege that her providers failed to recognize a worsening bipolar-spectrum illness and postpartum psychosis, prescribed an uncoordinated series of psychiatric medications and discharged her without the protection and follow-up she needed. Those claims have not been proven, and the medical providers have not publicly responded in detail because the litigation is ongoing.

The prosecution also disputes the defense’s account. It argues that Lindsay demonstrated planning and that she did not report clear hallucinations to her clinicians before the killings. Her attorneys say she later described hearing a commanding voice telling her to kill the children and herself.

These are questions the trial will examine. We should resist turning allegations from either side into settled fact.

What is already clear is that Lindsay did not simply stay silent and refuse care. She sought help. She saw professionals. She took prescribed medications. She entered a hospital.

And none of it kept her children, or Lindsay, safe.

If a mother can recognize that she is deteriorating, ask for help repeatedly, enter the medical system and still arrive at the worst possible outcome, then we have to ask what our definition of “getting help” actually means.

A referral is not a safety plan.

A prescription is not coordinated care.

A screening form is not treatment.

Discharging a mother does not mean the danger has passed.

What postpartum psychosis is

Postpartum psychosis is not the baby blues. It is not ordinary postpartum anxiety, and it is not simply a more intense version of postpartum depression.

It is a rare and severe psychiatric emergency. Symptoms can include delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, extreme agitation, confusion, rapidly changing moods and a dramatically reduced need or ability to sleep. It is often associated with bipolar disorder, including cases in which the person had never been diagnosed before pregnancy.

Someone experiencing psychosis may lose contact with reality. She may hear or see things that are not there. She may hold beliefs that feel completely real to her even when they are incomprehensible to everyone around her.

This does not mean that every mother with postpartum psychosis is violent. Most are not. Suggesting otherwise would deepen the very stigma that prevents women from telling the truth about frightening thoughts or symptoms.

It does mean that postpartum psychosis requires an immediate, specialized medical response. It cannot be treated as a difficult adjustment to motherhood or managed through a string of disconnected appointments.

Families also need to understand that the mother experiencing psychosis may not be able to identify it herself. To her, the altered reality may feel real. This is why education cannot begin only after a mother reports hallucinations. Partners, relatives, obstetric providers, pediatricians and emergency departments need to recognize the warning signs too.

Severe insomnia matters.

Abrupt changes in behavior matter.

Paranoia, confusion and unusual beliefs matter.

A mother saying that she does not feel like herself matters.

And when treatment is not working, sending her to the next appointment is not enough.

The two truths we keep trying to separate

Public conversations about this case often demand that we choose one truth.

Either we grieve the children or we acknowledge Lindsay’s illness.

Either we hold her responsible or we examine the care she received.

Either she is a monster or she is a victim.

But refusing complexity will not bring Cora, Dawson or Callan back, and it will not protect the next family.

Three children were killed by their mother. That truth is unbearable and cannot be softened.

Their mother was also severely mentally ill. The exact diagnosis, its timing and its effect on her legal responsibility are being argued in court, but the existence of a profound psychiatric crisis is not seriously in question.

Both truths belong in the same sentence.

Calling Lindsay ill does not reduce the value of her children’s lives. Examining the failures surrounding her care does not excuse what happened. Compassion is not acquittal, and accountability does not require us to deny the reality of mental illness.

Patrick Clancy has lived inside this complexity since the night he lost his children. In 2024, he told The New Yorker:

I wasn’t married to a monster. I was married to someone who got sick.

He is the person who has paid the greatest possible price. If he can make room for the truth of Lindsay’s illness without diminishing his love for Cora, Dawson and Callan, the rest of us should at least be willing to listen.

When sympathy disappears

As a society, we say we support mothers struggling with their mental health. We share resources. We tell women to ask for help. We post about removing the stigma.

But our compassion often has conditions.

We feel for a mother while her illness remains familiar and nonthreatening. We understand the crying, the anxiety, the intrusive thoughts and the feeling that she has disappeared inside her own life.

Then the illness becomes frightening, and our language changes.

She is no longer sick. She is evil.

She is no longer a mother who needed care. She is a monster who should have known better.

The switch is immediate because it protects us from a more frightening possibility: severe mental illness can alter the mind of someone who was loving, capable and trusted. It can happen inside a family that looks safe. It can happen to someone with medical knowledge. It can happen even after she asks for help.

That does not mean every tragedy is preventable. It does mean “she should have gotten help” cannot be the end of our thinking, especially when she did.

This is bigger than one case

The Lindsay Clancy trial is receiving international attention, but the crisis surrounding maternal mental health is not limited to the cases that become headlines.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, mental health conditions were the leading underlying cause of pregnancy-related death in data collected from 36 states between 2017 and 2019. That category included suicide and deaths related to substance use disorder. More than half of all pregnancy-related deaths occurred between seven days and one year postpartum, long after the single six-week visit that still functions as the end of postpartum care for too many women.

We should sit with that number.

Women do not stop being postpartum when the appointment calendar says they are. Their risk does not disappear because the baby is healthy, because they returned to work or because they can answer a questionnaire in a way that gets them out the door.

We need continuous mental health screening throughout pregnancy and the full postpartum year. We need providers trained to distinguish depression and anxiety from bipolar disorder, psychosis and medication-related activation. We need better communication between obstetricians, primary care providers, psychiatrists, emergency departments and pediatricians.

We need psychiatric facilities equipped to treat perinatal patients. We need clear discharge plans, rapid follow-up and support for the partners and relatives who are sent home with a person they love but little understanding of what to watch for.

And we need to stop making mothers prove they are close enough to catastrophe before we take them seriously.

Why VillageFor exists

VillageFor did not begin because Cait and I believed an app could solve every failure exposed by this case. It cannot. Postpartum psychosis requires urgent medical care, and technology will never replace trained clinicians, hospitalization or human intervention.

VillageFor began because we saw how many gaps a woman can disappear through before anyone understands the whole picture.

Her symptoms may live in one medical chart. Her sleep in another app. Her prescriptions with several providers. Her honest thoughts in a text to a friend. Her fear inside her own head.

No one sees the pattern until the pattern becomes a crisis.

We wanted to build something that helps women identify changes earlier, track their mental health over time and find language for what is happening before they are expected to walk into an appointment and explain it perfectly.

We wanted to help women answer the question so many mothers quietly ask: Am I okay?

On January 25, 2023, Cait and I read about a family destroyed. We saw three children whose lives had been taken. We saw a father facing a lifetime of grief. And we saw a mother who had entered the health care system again and again without receiving care that kept her family safe.

That day changed the direction of our lives.

We do not tell this story to make VillageFor part of the Clancy family’s tragedy. This story belongs to Cora, Dawson, Callan, Patrick and Lindsay. We tell it because their story became part of the reason we could no longer accept the system as it was.

No verdict will repair what happened in that Duxbury home.

Cora, Dawson and Callan will not come back. Patrick will continue living with a loss most of us cannot imagine. Lindsay will wake each day inside a body permanently injured by her suicide attempt and with the knowledge that her children are gone.

There is no silver lining large enough for that.

There is only a responsibility.

We can learn what postpartum psychosis looks like. We can believe women when they tell us something is wrong. We can build care that follows them beyond six weeks. We can demand coordination instead of another referral, monitoring instead of a handoff, and action before a family reaches the edge of disaster.

We can refuse to reduce this family to heroes and monsters.

And we can remember the three children at the center of it all.

Cora.

Dawson.

Callan.

May their names be more than a headline. May the lives they did not get to live push us to protect the mothers and children who are still here.