ఆక్రోశం (Aakrosham): Mothers in Crisis – Children, Mental Illness and the Failure to Protect

It Was a Cold Day in January

I don’t know how else to title this post other than with the Telugu word for unbearable anguish.

It is taking everything in my power to write this.

Callan was “the happiest, sweetest and easiest baby” that his nanny had ever taken care of. In 2023, on a cold evening in January, his mother strangled him and his two siblings with her exercise ropes in their home.

Cora was 5, Dawson 3 and Callan 8 months old.

Lindsay Clancy, the mother, then jumped out of a second story window and landed in her backyard. She survived but is now permanently disabled and is on trial for their deaths.

The prosecutor argues premeditation based on internet searches, phone history and digital evidence. 

The defense argues that she is not legally responsible. She was a patient with severe postpartum psychosis, and psychiatric problems allegedly worsened by meds causing hallucinations. For months, she had been ideating suicide and thoughts of harming her children.

When Beautiful Surfaces Mask Realities

Last month, Helena Wright, a 36 year old mother, held her 23 month old and 3 month old babies and leapt off the jagged cliffs of Cape Northumberland in south Australia. The day before she had gone to a local police station to speak to someone and they had asked her to come back the next day.

But instead of going back to the police station, Helena left her car running and walked to the edge of the cliffs. 3 month old Lewis hasn’t been found and the call for his search has been abandoned.

A Collision Of Horrors

In 2023, I had talked about Erika Murray, the mother who buried three infants in her home after secret pregnancies, and left her two children 3 year old and 5 month old girls in extreme neglect and filthy conditions in separate rooms.

The children were eventually discovered by one of her older children. And Murray was charged with child endangerment, assault, animal cruelty and concealing a fetal death, and received a 6 to 8 year sentence.

The case showcases the dire need to protect our children from the horrors of prolonged invisibility.

Read more about the case HERE.

Neglect Hurts More Than Hunger

Neglect by care givers has been a topic of well documented research. Years ago, there was an experiment that was conducted by an American Developmental Psychologist named Edward Tronick called the Still Face experiment. Children as young as 1 year old are put in front of their mother who suddenly in the middle of a play session turns insensitive and cold to their emotions and reactions.

It is a cruel experiment to watch, even though it lasts only a couple of minutes. But the fight of the child to convey their emotions, intentions and reactions to their mother is truly gut wrenching. As parents of our modern busy world, we’ve so many things beckoning our attention in addition to our children. Whether it is intentional or unintentional, the emotional damage of parental neglect can be long lasting and life altering for children.

Read more about the experiment HERE.

Is This Mother Ill Or Evil? 

The “Lindsay’s Army of Love” group and a few others have started a fundraiser with a goal of raising 2 million dollars is being officially framed around Lindsay’s parents who have suffered an extraordinary loss and financial burden. They have several arguments to support their mission. 

This was postpartum psychosis, not a rational act. 

 

She was failed by the mental-health system.

 

She’s not the monster people are making her out to be.

 

Supporting her doesn’t mean you approve of what happened.

Of course, regardless of what you and I think, she deserves due process and her day in court.

Crisis Or Catastrophic Failure? 

By all reports, Helena was a warm and bubbly stay-at-home mother who enjoyed gardening and sewing children’s clothes. Yes, the case is still unfolding. We don’t yet know what was happening inside that home. Was it mental illness? Domestic violence? Something else entirely? We don’t know. And that uncertainty is part of the horror.

Lindsay was a loving mother and nurse, and based on evidence submitted in court, was telling everyone who would listen that she was experiencing severe postpartum psychosis and was on medications. The journals themselves give a detailed explanation on how her state of mind was, and how she was cognizant of her suffering and her helplessness. 

It’s Not Mothers Vs. Children

Every day, everywhere, all around us, children are desperately protesting disconnection. They’re being neglected, abused and frightened.

On the other hand, overwhelmed parents are also doing everything in their power to make themselves and their misery visible through increasingly desperate, chaotic or even dangerous actions.

Innocent children often rely on their mother for their safety because they cannot protect themselves. But what if that mother is desperately mentally ill? We need to have louder conversations about the expectations placed on mothers, and about our collective failure to recognize mothers in crisis.

If Lindsay was journaling her inner torment, surely the husband must have seen it all play out in real time around the house. What was he doing to seek help for her and to ensure the safety of the children in her care? 

The Still Face experiment shows how profoundly an infant can react when a caregiver suddenly becomes emotionally unresponsive. Of course, it doesn’t prove that parental emotional neglect causes someone to become violent, nor does it explain murder.

And all the cases I talk about are not the same. Their circumstances, the alleged causes and the questions of responsibility are profoundly different. But they do share a common thread – children whose suffering was not adequately seen or understood before something tragic happened.

Questions We Need To Ask Ourselves

And here is where I struggle.

It took deliberate physical effort to end the lives of three children. How do we acknowledge profound mental illness without allowing the explanation to erase the agency and responsibility of the mother and the vulnerability and innocence of the children?

And then there is the other horror. Absolute strangers turning desperation and mental-health crisis into spectacle for the algorithm. The moment catastrophe strikes, TikTok commentators, fundraisers and armchair psychiatrists arrive on the scene.

My question is, where were we before it? 

How many times does a child have to communicate distress before the adult world considers that communication important?

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Observations, Opinions, and Cultural Critique

Cultural Essays from a Life Lived Between Worlds